Someday Never Comes
by BlackIceWitch
Summary: 4th story in Ramble On series. 2008. Dean has been raised from Hell and reunited with his brother. When the angel, Castiel, tells them they must save a Seal from being broken, the last person he ever expects to see again is there on the same mission. The question of Heaven's involvement is no longer a question and there are traitors everywhere. No slash. No spoilers.
1. Chapter 1

**Someday Never Comes**

* * *

**Chapter 1**

_Well, I'm here to tell you now, each and every mother's son,  
That you better learn it fast, you better learn it young,  
'Cause someday never comes._

_~ Creedence Clearwater Revival_

* * *

_**June 15, 2008. **__**St Parisius' Monastery, Qal-eh Wust, Afghanistan**_

The storm had come in with the usual lack of warning, plunging the temperatures of the mountain-enclosed valley from a relatively balmy fifty-four degrees to a chilling minus range. Snow, small and hard and driven before raging winds, filled the crevices and folds of the mountains and coated the narrow valley floor, rolling and tumbling like marbles down the steep slope and making the narrow road treacherous.

The monastery had stood at the top of the ravine, most of it reformed from the caves that riddled the geologically active area, for nine hundred years, a sanctuary and a place of study. It had been adopted by the Benedictines sometime in the fourteen hundreds, and the precentor wore long robes of plainly woven black homespun, drawn high around his neck as he came down the roughly cut stone steps to the gates, his feet pushing the granular snow from his path.

In front of the gate, Brother Thomas held a wildly flickering torch above his head.

"She just appeared out of the storm, Father," he said, raising his voice against the howling of the wind through the stone columns.

"Identification?"

The younger monk shook his head. Father Francis dropped to his knees, looking at the caked and frozen bloodied mess of her shoulder, and the still-bleeding but rapidly freezing mess of her feet.

"Pick her up, bring her inside," he said abruptly, taking the torch from the younger man. "There is infection here and first we must save her, before any questions might be asked."

"Is that a bullet hole, Father?" the monk asked as he dropped behind her and slid his arms under her shoulders and legs.

"Looks like one to me, Thomas," the precentor agreed prosaically. "There were a few armed parties in the mountains the last few weeks, perhaps she ran afoul of one of them."

He waited for the monk to get to his feet, the woman's hood falling back and the torch lighting a long spill of red hair, copper-bright beneath the blood and dust. Her clothing was threadbare and torn, and her feet were bare.

"I think I know who this might be, Thomas," he said, looking back at the bloodless white face. "Come, inside, fast."

* * *

_**One week later.**_

Father Monserrat walked along the narrow hall from his office, passing the refectory and the workrooms, hurrying to the great spiral stair that rose and fell in the centre of the building, leading up to the chapels and quarters, and down to the monastery's vaults. He began to climb, the long robe gathered in one hand.

As he reached the guest quarters, he slowed, drawing in deeper breaths to counteract the speed of the climb. The most senior monk, ordained like himself and of the same background, had given his permission for their guest to view the priceless treasures of the vaults and to make a copy if what she was seeking was, in fact, within their walls. He reached the room at the end of the hall and knocked on the thick planked door.

It took a short time to open and he looked down at the young woman standing there, thin and pale in a long shift and black robe.

"He agreed?" Ellie asked, her eyes meeting his. He smiled and nodded.

"Your walking speed does not seem to have improved," he said, walking into the room as she pulled it back and turning back to her as she closed it.

"It's a big improvement over not walking at all," she retorted mildly.

"What on earth happened to your boots?" he asked, frowning as he looked at her clothing, patched and washed and folded on the simple timber chest next to the bed.

"Walked them off," she said, hobbling across the room on bandaged feet to the desk by the open and glassless window embrasure. "I had to turn the horse loose when I got to the border and I couldn't go through the pass. They had lookouts anyway, but by the time they caught up it was night and they overshot me."

He shook his head. "You know that Patrick has been looking for you? It was him vouching for you that changed the mind of the abbot?"

She sank gratefully onto the wooden chair and shook her head, the thin sunshine catching the red and gold of her loose hair and lighting it briefly to flame.

"I'm glad to hear it," she said. "When can I look at the manuscripts?"

"When you can make the walk down there without fainting," the monk said acerbically. "A few days. In the meantime, you should be keeping off them," he added, looking at her feet pointedly.

"I don't have much time, Father," she said, the seriousness in her voice and face catching at him.

"You won't have any more by hurrying the healing process and developing another infection," he chided. "Have faith that God will not let you fail."

Ellie stared at him. She would've had faith in God if she wasn't sure that some percentage of his angels hadn't turned bad.

* * *

_**November 25, 2008**_

The Impala sped down the rain-washed black asphalt of Highway 61, travelling virtually alone.

"No, we need to go somewhere out of the out of the way." Dean glanced down at the map, spread out on the seat between them.

"What's the point, Dean? They can find us wherever we go." Sam looked out of the window. The drab fields and leafless woods looked even colder under the low, grey cloud cover.

"Not with Ruby's hex bags on us. We can just lie low for a couple of days while we figure out what we're doing next." He watched the black ribbon of road unfolding in front of him. After the last few days, he wanted peace. Quiet. No angels, no demons.

_So, I guess she's some big-time angel now, huh? She must be happy... Wherever she is._

_I doubt it._

Anna hadn't wanted to go back and he couldn't blame her. Power came at a cost and the cost was always too high. He shifted a little on the seat, the stab of guilt at his betrayal of her rising again. What he felt was mixed up with what they'd done, together, he knew. It didn't make it better. The dick had known what to push and he'd given her up and when she'd explained it to Sam, he'd known that he was never going to be the man he'd wanted to be. Nothing he'd done since the angel had raised him had been good.

They'd dropped Ruby at Lexington and headed east, driving through the night. Being caught between Alastair and Uriel was not an experience Dean wanted to repeat – ever.

"Alright." Sam gave in. "Big town or little town?"

"I don't care." He felt Sam's gaze on him, his brother's concern burning like a brand against the side of his face.

He shouldn't've said anything, he knew. Shouldn't've told his brother what he'd done. He'd said he wished he couldn't feel anything and that was true. Then the memories wouldn't be tearing at him, he could look at them clinically, remotely, the same way he'd seen the souls in Hell. But that hadn't happened. All that icy control had gone the minute his face had been touched by sunlight, real light, and he'd sucked in a deep breath of real air.

He hadn't even told Sam the worst part. He couldn't face the disappointment he knew he'd see in his brother's eyes.

_I've been following you around my entire life! I mean, I've been looking up to you since I was four, Dean. Studying you, trying to be just like my big brother._

That wasn't the case any more, he knew, taking a deeper breath to counteract the tightness in his chest at the memory. That'd gone. He was never going to get it back. He could see Sam's feelings, in the looks Sam slid at him when he thought his brother wasn't noticing, in the silences that filled the space between them, where there'd been … something … that wasn't now there. He wasn't someone anyone would look up to now. He wasn't someone anyone would want to be like … now.

Under the layers of consciousness, under the thoughts and minute-by-minute considerations of what they were doing, when he was awake and there wasn't too much time to think, Hell seethed. He could bury it so long as he kept moving, kept talking, doing things but it came out when he tried to rest. It didn't help that when he'd seen what his brother could do – was doing – had been doing since he'd been buried seemed to make a mockery of what he'd tried to give up for Sam. Neither of them had known the price of that act. Neither of them had known what it would cost them once it was done.

He forced his attention back on the road, easing his foot off the accelerator as he checked the speedometer. It didn't help to talk about it and he couldn't think about it. He just had to keep going, one step at a time. Just keep going and hope that someday it wouldn't feel as bad as it did now.

* * *

Dean pulled into Athens, West Virginia just past seven o'clock. There was a motel on the edge of town; clean, quiet and inexpensive, which was just as well because they were getting close to being tapped out.

Unloading the gear, neither man felt like talking, and they carried the bags into the room in silence, setting out the hex bags the demon had given them, running salt lines along the window ledges and doors, unscrewing the vent covers to run lines across them as well, both working with the ease of long familiarity.

Sam moved around the room distractedly, pouring lines automatically. He couldn't get Dean's confession out of his head. Forty years. He'd had no idea how to respond to what his brother had done, or how it had changed him. He kept trying to reference it to something else, anything else, but there was just _nothing_ that correlated to forty years spent in Hell.

He'd tried to make it seem not so … what? Devastating? There was no word to describe what his imagination insisted had been done to his brother. There was no word to describe the changes he could see in Dean, in those times he watched him when he was doing something else. He was twitchy and angry and close to the edge of something, all the time, Sam thought, dropping the salt bag and going to lift his duffel onto the end of the bed. Unzipping it, he pulled out the leather satchel that held the laptop – John's once, then Dean's, now mostly his, he supposed – and the few books he kept with him.

Every night, he heard Dean's breathing change, sometimes only minutes after he'd fallen asleep, sometimes as long as an hour later. He would lie in the dark and listen to his brother's indistinct mutterings, the occasional sharp cry, knowing that soon, sometimes very soon, Dean would be sweating and shaking and he'd wake after that, the ragged breathing controlled.

The first couple of times, he'd tried to wake him. He didn't do that now. Woken from the midst of it, it took his brother minutes to come out of whatever he was seeing, reliving. It dissipated faster if Dean woke on his own.

Every night, he'd hear the scritch of the flask's lid, or a bottle's lid, loud in the silence of the rooms they'd shared. And, he knew, Dean wouldn't try to get back to sleep. Just sit awake and drink until dawn. He could see the deepening shadows around the sockets of his brother's eyes, and sometimes he caught glimpses of panic, quickly hidden, or brushed off, or joked through.

He'd said that he'd ripped through the souls of the damned down there. Torn them apart to ease his pain. Sam didn't know exactly what that meant, but he could see that Dean felt different. Felt broken – not even that, shattered – by what he'd done. He'd tried, a few times now, to point out that acts committed under duress were not the responsibility of the person committing them. He didn't think Dean had taken any notice. He'd tried to point out that whatever souls he'd tortured under the demon's tuition, none could've been innocent. It was, after all, Hell. He didn't think Dean had cared about that either.

Going to the table and setting the book and laptop onto it, Sam pulled out a chair and sat down, running a hand through his hair in frustration. He needed his brother's strength, his commitment and the wild courage that had kept both going since he was old enough to remember. He couldn't see those things in Dean anymore. He'd known his brother wouldn't understand how much more powerful Ruby had made him, how he could use the tainted blood to become a warrior that had a chance – more than a chance – to defeat the forces aligned against them, against their world.

He hadn't told Dean all of it. The thought bounced through his defences and he acknowledged it bleakly. He'd told himself that the end justified the means and killing Lilith was still at the top of his To Do list. But he hadn't told Dean how he'd built his strength so much and so rapidly. Ruby had been doubtful about keeping it from Dean. He knew better. Dean wouldn't understand, could never understand that sacrifices came in many forms and this was one he was making for his family, for the world, on his own. He would pay whatever cost came of it, gladly. He hadn't been able to save his brother. The thought ate at him if he let it. He was going to save everyone, he thought, and that would have to do.

* * *

Dean dumped his bag beside his bed and pulled off his boots, peripherally aware of his brother moving around the room, setting up at the table. He dropped onto the edge of the bed, a single thought looping through his mind – Anna's forgiveness had not made him feel any better, was, as a matter of fact, twisting like a rusty knife blade through his guts.

_You did the best you could. I forgive you_. He closed his eyes at the memory of her voice, the touch of her hand, gentle on the back of his neck, the soft press of her mouth over his, forcing himself to face the memory, the punishment of it not enough, it would never be enough but it was something he needed. He'd given her up, let her down when she'd needed him the most. Like everyone else he'd failed.

After a few minutes, he got up, driven to his feet by the futility of what he was doing, or trying to do. He needed sleep. He needed a drink. He needed five minutes out of his head to get some fucking respite from the weight of guilt, memories, more guilt, pain and heartache.

Stopping in the middle of the room, he looked over at his brother. "You notice if we passed any decent-looking watering-holes?"

Sam lifted his gaze from the screen and looked at him warily. "Nothing special. Why?"

"I need to have some fun," he said, turning back to the bed and reaching for his boots, his tone holding an edge of mockery for himself. Fun wasn't exactly what he needed. Amnesia came closer. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled his boots back on. "Wine, women, song."

"I thought you wanted to get some rest," Sam countered, looking at him more closely.

Dean nodded readily, keeping his eyes fixed on his boots. The rest of enough whiskey to blunt the edges of thought; a soft, receptive female body to lose himself in; and hopefully the combination putting dreaming off the agenda until morning. "That is rest. And relaxation. R&R, bro."

He got to his feet, sweeping the car keys and room key from the nightstand with one hand. "C'mon, Sammy, how long's it been since we just went out for a few drinks and a game of pool? It'll be good. Decompression."

Sam shrugged, pushing the laptop screen closed and getting up. "Yeah, sure. Okay."

* * *

There were three bars in the small town, two of which served food and advertised music 'til late. Dean made a u-turn at the end of the main street and found a parking space a little under a block from the one his brother deemed the least offensive.

Walking down the street, following the unmistakable sounds of a drinking establishment in full swing, Dean wondered if he was going to be able to shut out his thoughts for long enough to get what he needed. As they came in through the door, he felt himself relax incrementally. The music was loud enough to prevent quiet conversation, an eclectic mix of rock'n'roll, metal and latest hits. The smells from the kitchen were appetising.

He walked over to the bar, looking around at the nearly full room, feeling his brother on his heels. For a moment, as the bass beat infiltrated his bloodstream, pounding in counter time to the beat of his heart, he felt it recede, the tangle of utter crap in his head. He felt like he had a couple of years ago, before he'd started losing everyone he'd needed. He grinned at the bartender, and the curvaceous blonde sitting on the stool to his right.

"Dean, I'm gunna find a table. Get me whatever isn't dripping in grease," Sam's voice muttered in his ear, and he nodded, that too more like the way it'd been, back then, back before … everything.

"What can I get you?" the bartender, a buxom brunette in her late thirties, asked him. She leaned across the bar, her cleavage bulgingly revealed by the low-cut tank she wore as she more or less yelled the query at him.

"Couple of beers, whiskey shots, a burger, loaded and, uh …" he shifted his gaze from the smooth, freckled curves of her breasts to the chalked menu to one side of the bar. "Grilled chicken salad, no dressing."

"Got it," she said, reaching under the bar and pulling out a couple of bottles of ice-cold beer from the fridge beneath the counter, levering the tops off and leaving them on the bar in front of him. She turned away, scribbling the order onto a pad and clipped it to the order rack at the back of the bar, her ass, he noticed, fitting the tight curves of her jeans admirably.

"You in town long?" the blonde beside him asked, and he turned to look at her, noting big blue eyes, heavily lined, a feathery, wavy mass of pale blonde hair that fell over her shoulders and down her back, showing darker at the roots, smooth tan skin, a lot of it on display in a custom-cut, fitted turquoise bustier and short, faded denim skirt.

"Couple of nights," he said loudly back, leaning closer to her. She smelled of some sweet and slightly exotic perfume, the scent slightly clouded by the smells of the bar, beer and bourbon and cigarette smoke. "What's your name?"

"Lindsey," she told him, smiling widely.

Twenty-three or four, he decided, looking at her face. She was pretty and friendly and he felt himself stir, all the things he'd wanted to forget about getting more and more distant as she laid her hand over his on the bar and the touch, more than friendly, sent a jolt of anticipation through his skin and nerves and down to his groin.

Food, he thought, relieved that the escape he'd always looked for was still available, a couple of beers and shots, a couple for the girl beside him and then back to her place. Sammy could fend for himself tonight.

* * *

Sam found a table by the rear exit, sighing as he watched his brother lean closer to the blonde at the bar. At the back of his mind, he'd known what his brother was wanting in the way of decompression after the last couple of weeks, but he'd kidded himself that Dean's proposal of a game or two, a quiet dinner and some drinks were going to be enough. He shook his head at himself. It'd never been enough before.

Looking around the room, he wondered if he should be thinking of doing the same thing. The small town had plenty of pretty girls and all of them seemed to be here, talking in groups, dancing on the pocket-handkerchief dance floor, leaning against the pool tables, long legs shown off in skin-tight jeans or micro-mini skirts; skinny or slender or plumper; blonde, brunette and redhead.

He shook his head slightly again, his gaze dropping back to the laminated menu on the table in front of him. It wasn't his scene, never had been. Jess had prised him out of their apartment to bars on a fairly regular basis, but it was her, being with her, that'd made those nights fun, not the loud music or the flesh on display, the anticipation of a pick up, or the alcohol.

He missed her. All the time. Sometimes it was worse than others. He had the feeling he might not ever stop missing her.

The memory of the demon intruded, wiping Jess' face from his mind's eye abruptly. Ruby's latest incarnation was a small brunette, slim but curvy. Empty, Ruby'd told him. Coma patient whose soul had already departed. How the hell would he know? He'd never be able to tell if she was telling him the truth or not.

His brother had shown an incredible restraint when he'd told him what'd happened while he'd been gone. Dean's suspicions had all been there, but he'd made an effort to keep them damped down, had kept his tone reasonable, had kept his arguments logical. And he'd – sort of – apologised to Ruby, had acknowledged that she was helping them.

He looked around as he heard the clump of Dean's boots behind him. Dean put a plate in front of him, followed by a bottle of beer.

"Got mine to go," his brother told him cheerfully and Sam's gaze shifted from the one-sided smile on Dean's face to the blonde standing beside him, her arm curled possessively around his brother's hips. "This is Lindsey," Dean added, glancing down at her. "She's, uh, got this awesome stereo system she, uh – well, fuck, you know."

Sam nodded resignedly. He did know. "Gimme the keys."

Dean dropped them on the table, and turned away, his hand on the blonde's ass as they wove their way through the bar's crowd to the front door. Sam looked at his meal and sighed.

_Fun, huh? Oh yeah, this was loads of fun_. He picked up his fork and stabbed at a piece of chicken. It was no big, he thought. He'd eat, go back to the motel, check out whatever omens might be showing with both Heaven and Hell so prominent on the plane right now and get an early night.

In his veins, the blood sizzled a little, and he ignored the sensation, telling himself again that he didn't _need_ it, he just needed the power it brought.

* * *

Lindsey's apartment block was only a couple of streets away from the bar and Dean walked beside her, his arm over her shoulders, aware that the comfortable, relaxed feeling he'd had in the bar was slowly seeping away.

The tall, leggy blonde they'd met on the shifter case in Pennsylvania flickered into his thoughts and he glanced down at the woman walking beside him, wondering if he was changing his type. Not that he'd ever really had one, it'd been more of a coincidence than a conscious decision. Lindsey shared a few of Jamie's obvious assets, enough that he hoped he could recapture the easiness he'd felt then, the familiar comfort of touch and taste and smell and sensation.

He hadn't felt his memories so strongly back then, he knew. Had been more overwhelmed by the job he thought he'd been raised to do and the fact that he'd been noticed by a power he hadn't even believed in … back then.

In early November, after seeing Sam turn Samhain into a pile of ash, he'd tried to find someone to lose himself in, push that crap aside for a couple of hours, because he'd been hanging on by his fingernails at that point. The woman had been attractive, eager and willing but not enough, not nearly enough to keep Hell away from him. He'd thought that it was just too much, all the crazy on top of him and he hadn't been able to focus on what the hell he was trying to do.

With Anna, it'd been completely different. Because she'd known, he wondered? Because he didn't have to pretend to be someone else? Because she'd understood and wanted him for himself? He didn't know, he'd just known that there'd been no bounce and play in their lovemaking, no _sex_ to the sex, it'd been about honesty and pain and fear and healing, he thought, about the last night on earth and all the fucking implications of that were now so fucking clear to him.

He felt Lindsey press against his side, and shook off his memories and uncertainties, turning with her as she pushed him to the steps of her block. She slid free of his arm and fished around in her purse for her keys, glancing back at him with a smile. Smiling back at her was harder than he'd thought it would be.

She held the door open for him and he looked around the tiled and silent foyer, following her to the elevator doors set into the wall to the right, stepping in behind her when they opened. She pressed the button for the fifth floor and turned to him, sliding her hands up his chest to link them behind his neck as she reached up and kissed him.

As his eyes closed, he thought he smelled the pungent scent of sulphur and a shiver ran down his spine. Lindsey broke the kiss, smiling up at him.

"I know, me too," she said, her voice husky.

He blinked at her, wondering what the hell she was talking about then realised what she'd thought, forcing another smile as he nodded noncommittally.

The elevator pinged and the doors opened and she turned away, catching his hand as she headed down the hall to her apartment.

* * *

Relax, he told himself as he ran his hands down Lindsey's sides, leaning back against the arm of the couch and pulling her on top of him. He closed his eyes as her lips covered his, feeling the warmth of desire beginning to fill him–

_The wink of a silvery blade, flashing through the air and burying itself deep into–_

His eyes snapped open, and he felt his heart rate accelerate, sweat beading on his forehead. The image disappeared, and he kept his eyes open as the woman he was kissing moaned softly against his mouth. He tried to focus on the sensations, the feel of her breasts under his hands, the brush of her hair against his neck, the insistence of her lips on his mouth. His eyes fluttered shut again as she slid her hand down his chest and stomach–

_Screams and blood and the overpowering smell of brimstone, and laughter, the high demon laughter–_

He sat up abruptly, eyes wide and staring at the puzzled face in front of him.

"What's wrong?" Lindsey asked, pushing her hair back from her face.

"Uh, nothing …" He shook his head, and tried to find a reassuring smile, not sure it was all that reassuring as he felt the press of the memories against his mind. "I … uh … thought I'd left the stove on at home for a second there."

"Oh, yeah. That happens to me all the time too." She leaned forward and kissed him again, and he kept his eyes open, shoving the lingering traces of the memories away, pushing them down.

They moved to the bed, and he tried to concentrate on what he was seeing, on what he was feeling, hands and mouth and fingers and tongue following the remembered paths, breathing in the light floral scent of her perfume, telling himself that he was out, alive, free …

… but he couldn't close his eyes, couldn't lose himself in her, couldn't relax.

She groaned and arched under him and he snatched his hand away from her, staring at his fingers, looking for blood. Everything he did, everything she did, had a counterpoint in his mind, in his memories, and he shook helplessly, needing a release, unable to do more than twist himself into knots, trying to find it.

She lay on her back, hair mussed and dampened with sweat, staring up at him as he clenched his fists, and tried to regain some kind of control so that he didn't look like a fucking psychopath.

Her eyes widened suddenly.

"Jesus!" She pulled the bedspread over herself, her gaze fixed on something over his shoulder. He turned around.

Castiel stood at the end of the bed, his face completely expressionless.

"Dean, we have to talk. Another Seal is at risk."

Dean looked at the angel, then nodded slowly. He didn't know or care if the angel was surprised by the lack of anger in the response. Relief was trickling through him, a sneaking, sly relief that he didn't have to stay here, didn't have to keep trying. His body was aching but he didn't want to be here, where everything brought it all back, vivid and horrifying as the nightmares he couldn't escape from when he slept.

Glancing at the woman beside him, he rolled off the bed, picking up his clothes and getting dressed.

"What the-?" Lindsey's gaze flicked from the total stranger in a trenchcoat in her apartment to the man she'd brought home who was making no move to protect her. "Hey! You, get the hell out of my place! Dean–?!"

Castiel walked to Lindsey, and she drew back from him, her eyes widening. The angel reached out a hand and touched her lightly on the forehead. Her eyes closed, fingers releasing the edge of the cover as she slipped down sideways onto the pillow.

Dean looked down at her. The desire had gone, although the ache was still there, something he'd try to do something about later on. He didn't want to think about Lindsey, didn't want to think about what had happened, what was happening to him, every time he tried to find some point of human contact. Turning away from her, he looked at Castiel.

"What Seal?"

* * *

The angel zapped them back to the motel and Dean unlocked the door and walked in, leaving the door open and tossing his key on the shelf to the left of the door.

At the dining table, Sam looked up in surprise, his forehead furrowing as he saw the angel walk in behind his brother.

"I thought you were going to be gone all night? R&R?"

"Wasn't meant to be," Dean said, trying to inject some regret into his tone. "Apparently we got work to do first."

Sam closed the laptop, watching the angel cautiously. His view of angels had undergone a radical swing in the last few weeks. "Castiel."

Castiel looked at him and inclined his head politely as he closed the door behind him. "Sam."

Dean walked to the table, taking a seat next to his brother. "Well, give us the details."

The angel moved to stand beside the table, looking at the brothers. "In Chicago, there's a small boy who is about to become a seal to the cage. He's very special. Lilith has sent her demons to take him. If they can corrupt this boy before his seventh birthday, the next Seal will be broken."

Sam frowned. "What do you mean, about to become a seal? How's he special?"

"That is information you don't need to know," Castiel said repressively, turning to look at Sam.

"This another test, Cas?" Dean rubbed his eyes tiredly. "'Cause if you're planning on wiping out a town, or killing anyone, then we'd like to know now. So we don't waste our time."

The angel looked back at the hunter, his gaze steady. "It is not a test. You have to get the boy before the demons do. You have to keep him safe until he turns seven. Then it will be over, the Seal safe."

"An' if we can't?"

"If you cannot secure the boy, and the demons have him, we will have to kill him, to stop the Seal from being broken," Cas said, his voice without inflexion. "I would prefer it if you were successful."

Sam exhaled loudly. "Not again."

Dean glanced at him and back to the angel. "These God's orders? Killing kids? I don't know … just doesn't _sound_ like God to me. Tell me something, Cas, you sure you know what's going on up there?"

Castiel looked around the room uneasily. "I am not sure of anything right now, Dean. But the orders are the orders, from the highest levels." He turned back to them, his face drawn as he continued, "And the end result is clear. You'd rather Lilith break another Seal? Take us one step closer to Lucifer's rising?"

"How much time do we have?" Dean got to his feet, going to the fridge. "When does the kid turn seven?"

"Not much to get to Chicago. He will reach his seventh year in four weeks."

"Not much time for the other side either then," Sam said thoughtfully, looking around at his brother.

"We'll leave in the morning," Dean said, extracting a beer and knocking the top off.

Castiel looked at them, his expression disapproving. "Leaving now would be better."

Dean's eyebrow lifted. "We drove six hours to get here. After being caught in the cross-fire between angels and demons. We're human, Cas, we need to rest – occasionally."

Castiel bowed his head, his gaze dropping. "Yes, of course."

"Where's your buddy, by the way?" Sam asked.

The angel took a couple of seconds to decipher the reference. "Uriel is in Heaven. Receiving further orders."

"Huh." Dean walked to the bed, dropping onto the edge and pulling off his boots, for the second time. "Good."

The sound of beating wings, and the smaller clap of the air rushing to fill the void where Castiel had stood, accompanied the angel's disappearance.

Dropping the second boot onto the floor, Dean looked across the room at his brother. "What do you think?"

"I think they want us to do their dirty work for them again," Sam said pensively.

Dean nodded. "Yeah."

"What'd he mean, about corrupting the boy?" Sam asked. "How do you corrupt a six-year old?"

Looking away, Dean shrugged. "No clue."

He could've told Sam that corruption was about the rewiring of the mind, the realignment of the soul. It would open a conversation he couldn't have. Anyone could be corrupted, with enough pain, he thought. Anyone.

* * *

Dean lay on his side, listening to the soft snores from the other bed. Distantly, in the far back reaches of his mind, he could hear screaming. He tried to shut it out, but he could only mute it, couldn't make it disappear. Fear ran along his nerve ends, shaking him, and he reached down for the pint bottle that sat just under the edge of the bed, picking it up and unscrewing lid and tipping the bottle up, swallowing convulsively.

The dreams were unbearable, shredding his sleep. He wasn't going to be functioning for much longer if it was spilling into his waking hours as well.

The image of her body kept flashing into his mind, naked on the bed, arms lifted toward him. As he looked at the image, he felt desire stir, a deep warmth in his groin reaching out to his limbs. He tried to hold onto that feeling, that normal, _human_ feeling. Then the images would change, and the smooth, pale body would be covered in wounds, bleeding and broken, light winking from the razor blade above her. His stomach jumped, and he clamped his teeth together, arousal vanishing, a throbbing ache left behind.

He squeezed his eyes shut, drinking until the whiskey was gone, his body rigid with tension. He had to find a way to shut it out, to bury it deep enough so that he could rest. At least when he was awake.

Sometimes, lately, so deep inside that he wasn't sure that it was real, he could feel a blackness, something not quite alive, not dead, squirming. He couldn't look at it. He was too afraid of what he would see.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

* * *

_**November 24, 2008. Mt Sinai, Egypt.**_

The dry heated air filled the large room and Ellie yawned, blinking as she straightened up from the table, stretching out her neck and back, looking around with a half-rueful, half-resigned expression at the familiar surroundings. Too many damned monasteries and libraries in the last few months, she thought, resting her elbows on the table and rubbing at her eyes with her fingertips.

She'd been in Egypt now for almost a month, in the monastery of St Catherine, a fortress built more than a thousand years ago that sat tucked into the base of a gorge at the foot of the mountain. The Sacred Order of the God-trodden Mount Sinai was its official name, but no one here used it. Presenting her credentials as a scholar of ancient languages and mythology, she'd been allowed access to the oldest documents reluctantly, the Orthodox monks easing restrictions when they'd seen how careful she was with their treasures. All the buildings of the monastery and the more modern ones of the spread out town that surrounded it were well heated, the high desert was cold and could be bitter as the year turned to its close.

The not-quite-healed hole, just under the collarbone in her left shoulder, twinged a little and she rotated the shoulder, easing the sore muscle. The bullet had lodged against the bone and had been dug out in Afghanistan. It was taking longer to heal than she'd thought it would, probably due to the infection.

On the long table in front of her, books, manuscripts, texts and notes were scattered, a path traced through words from one century to the next, following clues in different ancient languages that might have meant something or might've been wishful thinking on the part of their authors. She wasn't sure. With the fever dreams of the infection, some memories of the glass room had returned, fragments mostly, the dark face of a man whose smile made her shiver when she recalled it.

_Dean Winchester has to go to Hell … you read the prophecy, he has to break the first Seal … no one is killing Lilith until the time is right … our Father has forsaken us …_

His voice, remembered in her nightmares, had been mocking and dismissive. There weren't enough details for her to understand what he'd meant, but the prophecy had been in her apartment and it'd been clear. _Heaven reaches down_.

Somewhere, here perhaps, or the Vatican library, or in some forgotten corner of the world, there were answers to her questions. Questions about angels.

"You have been very diligent in your search."

Startled, she turned around and looked up, seeing one of the monks standing behind and a little to one side of her. Tall and dark-haired, he wore a long robe of the Orthodox black over a Bedouin thobe of white cotton. He appeared to be in his mid-forties, his skin tan and weathered, his eyes a surprising bright blue, the colour of the desert sky. Unlike most of the monks, his beard was short, jet-black and threaded with silver.

"It is a pleasure to see someone so young versed in the ancient languages," he continued, looking down at the documents surrounding her. "They usually take many years of study to master."

Ellie kept her face expressionless as she answered politely, "I had an excellent tutor."

"Perhaps I could help you find what you seek?" He spread his hand, gesturing at the shelving that surrounded them. "I helped to catalogue and index this library. What is it that you are searching for?"

Ellie looked down at the aged parchment in front of her, feeling the prick of suspicion at the offer. Looking back at the monk, she said, "Your eyes are quite a rare colour for the desert peoples, aren't they?"

He smiled, his expression warming. "But I am not from the desert, although I have lived here for many, many years."

Walking to the side of the table, he added, "I can understand your reticence."

"Can you?"

"We live in dangerous times, where trust is a commodity not easily found or easily held," he said, glancing around the silent and empty room. "But I can help."

She wasn't quick to trust. In fact, quite the opposite; her life had inspired paranoia and suspicion and she'd cultivated both with the single-minded aim of staying alive. But there was something about this monk … looking up at him, she saw his eyes were filled with sharp intelligence, softened by understanding, perhaps even compassion. In a strange way, since the men were nothing alike, he reminded her of Father Monserrat. And she needed help, she could no longer pretend to herself that she didn't. She had no time. Dean had been in Hell for the equivalent of sixty years, in Hell's peculiar time.

"I'm not sure anyone can help me find what I'm looking for, Brother –?"

"I am Brother Penemue." He gestured to the chair beside her. "May I sit?"

"Of course." Ellie reached out and moved the untidy pile of books and papers to one side. "Ellie Morgan."

"I am honoured to meet you, Miss Morgan," he said, the inflection in his voice reminding her of the desert dwellers she'd met years before, in Morocco. The Tuareg were also a very polite and hospitable people.

Watching as his gaze dropped to the reading materials that were spread across the table, Ellie felt her pulse leap in her throat when he commented, "You have been looking through the references to angelic lore."

She stared at him, suppressing the desire to wipe suddenly sweaty palms against her clothes. He inclined his head, a rueful smile crinkling his eyes as he looked up and saw her expression.

"I'm sorry, I did not mean to pry," he said. "I watch what people study here, it's almost a hobby, perhaps a rude one." He looked back at the collection on the table. "And it's not so very hidden."

She nodded, a little warily, at the truth of that. "Yes, I'm doing research on angels."

"Then I may be of some service to you, Miss Morgan." He leaned toward her, his face becoming serious. "For it is a field I myself am very interested in."

"Do you know why angels would be aiding demons to release Lucifer from his cage?"

The words came out without volition, without thought. She couldn't believe she'd said them out loud. But as she watched his face, Ellie thought that he'd been expecting them.

"Yes," he said, his voice dropping a little. "I can think of reasons why that would happen." He looked around the library casually, and back to her. "These things are not necessarily safe to discuss here, do you understand?"

She looked down at the notes in front of her, wondering how far she could trust the man sitting opposite. "Maybe you could point me to some texts that might give more detail?"

He seemed to study her for a moment, then he nodded, getting to his feet. He turned and walked unhurriedly into the stacks, the swirl of the black robe sweeping over the floor, his leather sandals silent over the stone flags. She heard the clang of the iron gates at the other end of the main room. The gates, she knew, that led into the restricted document area.

She waited, her heartbeat booming in her ears. There was something very different about the man, her instincts insisted, more so than his lack of surprise at her question, or the sense of age she had about him, in defiance of his appearance.

She'd been careful to cover her trail, from the US to Prague, Venice, then Malta and Tangiers, and she was positive that no one had followed her to Cairo, but even the best laid cover was sometimes undone, if luck or destiny intervened. At one time she might've laughed at that thought, but not any more. Even if it hadn't been destiny itself, the creatures of another plane had already interfered once, and she wasn't about to make the same mistake twice.

The dark-haired monk returned to the table almost fifteen minutes later, his arms holding several old manuscripts. Very old, Ellie thought, blinking at the texts in surprise as he laid them reverently in front of her.

"I think these will give you some – necessary – background into your research, Miss Morgan," he said. "I would be happy to discuss them with you after you've read them."

Glancing around the empty room, Ellie wrote her room number for the guesthouse that sat on the other side of the wadi garden behind the monastery, on a piece of paper. "I would appreciate your insights, Brother Penemue."

Bowing slightly, he took the paper and slipped it under the soft black robe he wore and turned and left the room.

Letting out her held breath, she drew the manuscripts he'd brought closer, pulling on the soft, white cotton gloves that were necessary for handling any of the ancient documents. She opened the first one and began to read, her hand going to her notebook and pen as her gaze skimmed down the page.

She hadn't lied, her tutor in Aramaic and Akkadian, in Hebrew and Greek and Latin, had been very good. She'd studied for four years and through Kasha, had inadvertently discovered she had a modest gift for languages, for seeing root and pattern and rule in one language to the next and although she hadn't spent any more time on the studies than had been strictly necessary to be able to verify documents from the distant past herself, she could read what the monk had brought her.

She didn't notice the passage of time, or the light fading from the high clerestory windows and the softer electric lights coming on in the rooms. She didn't notice hunger or thirst or weariness as she read through the carefully bound parchment, gevil and papyrus scripts, absorbing the details with a single-minded concentration. The library was silent when she finished the last of them and laid it back on the table, but she could hear the hammering of her heart against her ribs and the slightly ragged edge to her breathing. She looked at her watch.

Eight o'clock. She set out the manuscripts neatly at the end of the table, leaving her books in piles around them and gathered up her notes.

* * *

_**November 26, 2008. OH-117 W, Ohio.**_

Dean stared at the traffic line ahead and slammed his palm against the wheel.

"You'd think the damned dicks would be able to give a little warning, wouldn't you?" he snarled, twisting around in the seat to see how far back he'd have to go to get around the fender-bender ahead of them.

Swinging the wheel to the side, he shifted into reverse, ignoring the blaring horns behind him as he started to back up the shoulder.

"Uh … Dean–"

"Not now."

The black car increased speed, Dean watching through the rear window, keeping it within the narrow confines of the gravelly earth dropoff to his left and the white-painted line to the right. The turn off was a couple of hundred yards behind them and the traffic jammed on the highway extended further than that by the time they'd reached it.

Sam breathed a sigh of relief as the car stopped at the turn off and his brother shifted back to first and accelerated.

"That was … interesting," Sam said, looking across at Dean's set profile.

"Didn't feel like waiting," Dean said.

"Yeah, I got that."

There were times when dealing with his brother was like handling a bomb, he thought, a very unstable one with a number of possible detonators. He looked down at the notes he'd made.

"You find anything on the kid – what makes him so special?" Dean asked a moment later.

"No," Sam said, leaning back into the corner of seat and door. "Born in Chicago, single mom, normal development from the hospital records … his mother works in a bookstore. That's it."

"But for some reason, this kid turns into a seal to the devil's cage?"

"Yeah." Sam shook his head. "Got me."

"What'd Bobby come up with on the seals?"

"Not much," he said. "The apocrypha agrees with what Cas already told us. A possible six hundred and sixty-six seals, but only sixty-six of them need to be broken. Uh … seals can be anything and they're all over the world."

Dean frowned at the highway. "If God – or the angels – put those seals in place, how're the demons finding them?"

Sam stared through the windshield, thinking it was a good question. "I don't know. There's nothing Bobby could find on what or where they were."

"That doesn't necessarily mean that some asshat didn't write it all down somewhere," Dean said, glancing sideways at him.

"No," Sam agreed. "But you'd think the angels'd keep track of things like that, given it's, uh, the devil, right?"

"Yeah, right."

He looked out the passenger window, not sure if he should raise the subject again, deciding to against his better instincts. "Ellen said she hasn't been able to find any of Ellie's contacts."

Dean's scowl appeared as expected. Sam wasn't sure of the reason behind his brother's antipathy for discussing the hunter. Bobby and Ellen'd been trying to find some of Ellie's sources in the eastern states for months now, hoping they'd be able to give them more information. Dean had been against it from the start.

"What a surprise," his brother said, his tone mocking.

"We need all the info we can find, Dean," Sam said defensively. "Why aren't you getting on board with this?"

Dean didn't respond, his brows drawing closer as his gaze remained fixed to the road unwinding ahead of them. Sam noticed the car increasing speed and huffed out an impatient exhale.

"What happened wasn't your fault, wasn't our fault," he tried again, keeping his voice low and reasonable.

"Oh, right," Dean grated. "She was helping someone else, right? Nothing to do with trying to save my ass from being taken to Hell."

"She knew what the risks were," Sam argued. They'd been over this before. He watched his brother's expression settle into a mulish stubbornness and gave up.

"How much longer to Chicago?"

"Four-five hours."

Sam turned away to look out the window. The truck had been burned out completely and by the time he and Bobby had buried Dean and gone to see it, there was nothing left but a twisted and blackened frame. Bobby had spent a month searching for any leads on Ellie's life, trying to find where she'd lived in Richmond, the contacts she might've had but had come up with nothing.

Neither of them had had the will to keep looking then, he'd left the old man nursing a bottle of whiskey and had searched for answers on his own, a search that had gotten more and more reckless until Ruby had shown up. He wasn't sure of what Bobby had done after he'd left, but it hadn't been until Dean had been raised that he and Ellen had begun to ask around the scattered hunters they knew for any of Ellie's old contacts.

They'd found nothing. Ellen hadn't expected to, he knew. She'd told Bobby straight out that Ellie had kept her business to herself.

Glancing sideways at Dean, he wondered at the depth of responsibility his brother felt over her death. Maybe it was just the accumulation of deaths, piling up alongside their road, he considered, leaning his temple against the cool glass of the window beside him. He remembered clearly Dean's discomfort with the efforts Ellie had gone to, to try to save him. Maybe it was that. Not knowing why she'd gone to those lengths for him. He thought he'd known why she'd done what she'd done, but he'd never gotten her to admit to it. He didn't know why it hadn't seemed to have occurred to his brother, but he couldn't ask now. Dean shut down conversations about Ellie faster than he shut them down about Hell.

* * *

Looking down at the speedometer, Dean eased his foot off the accelerator, dropping them back to just twenty over the speed limit. He risked a look at his brother from the corner of his eye.

Along with the memories of the pit, he tried to keep his memories of Ellie buried. He had about the same rate of success with those as he did with the others. He'd cringed when he'd found out that Bobby, then Ellen, were trying to find her contacts.

_I made a lot of good friends in Europe, and I try and catch up whenever I can._

She'd told him that on the ghost hunt in Michigan, both of them on watch while Sam had slept. _Good friends_, he'd thought at the time, wondering how the hell she'd managed that in the life. He thought of facing those friends and telling them that she'd died trying to save him and his mind baulked at the image, freezing up with shame and pushing it aside. Too many people had died for them already, one way or another. He didn't want to contact anyone in her life who might become a target just from that contact … or who would look at him, blame for her death in their eyes.

He didn't know why she'd gotten involved, and he admitted to himself, he'd been so filled with hope that they would succeed, would get him off the hook and find out who or what had been behind it all, that he hadn't tried too hard to find out. And then demons had gotten to her and that'd ended all of it.

_She knew the risks_, Sam'd said. And yeah, she had, he knew that. Nothing she'd done that he'd known of had ever been without her knowing exactly what she was getting into. He told himself he didn't miss her, didn't care that much, it was just the responsibility that weighed on him, the guilt for another death following Jim and Caleb, his father and Ash.

It was a lie and it sat uneasily in him. So he tried to not to think about her at all.

* * *

_**St Catherine's Monastery, Mt Sinai, Egypt**_

Ellie let herself into her small room at the back of the guesthouse, and flipped on the light. The dark-haired monk sat in the chair beside the table she'd co-opted for a desk. She felt no surprise at seeing him there, despite the wards and sigils, defences and lines she'd run around the room when she'd arrived. What he was, she thought, was not an enemy. She wasn't sure if he would be a friend. She put her notes down on the table and dropped her bag on the end of the bed.

"So. You have read them?" he asked, leaning forward, his disconcertingly blue eyes fixed on her.

"You're a Watcher, aren't you? _Irin We-Qadishin_?"

He smiled slightly. "Yes."

"How could two thousand years of Christian teachings have gotten it all so wrong?" She turned away from the table, turning on the small electric kettle on the bench and taking two cups from the tray, spooning out the coarse black tea from an enamelled metal tin that sat next to them.

"Have you ever played a game called Chinese Whispers?" he asked and she glanced over her shoulder at him, one brow rising in query.

"It's called Telephone where I'm from. But yes." She poured the boiling water over the tea leaves and brought the cups to the table, setting one in front of him.

"Then you know what happens over time, especially over a long time." He looked down at the cup. "Everyone thinks their own version is correct."

"But calling Revelations a prophecy …" She shook her head, thinking of the writings of John, addled and repetitive and ultimately wrong. It didn't matter, she realised. They were well on their way and there was only one question that mattered now.

"How can it be stopped?" She sat down in the chair opposite him and blew on her tea. In the last three months she'd discovered far more than she'd ever wanted to know about Heaven and angels. None of it had been in the slightest bit reassuring.

"I'm not sure that it can," Penemue said, picking up the sugar bowl and adding several spoonfuls to his tea. He leaned back in the chair, his hands cradling the cup gently as he looked at her. "No one has felt our Father for more than a millennium now. They believe He has left us."

The memory of the archangel's words returned to her. _My Father has forsaken us_, he'd said in her dream, his face twisted into a snarl.

"Then why tell me?" Ellie looked at the monk, a small crease appearing between her brows. "If there's no chance of changing things?"

"There is always a chance, even if it is only a slight one," Penemue said. "God gave humanity free will for a reason. And even we fallen ones have a choice. To serve humanity, or to attempt to exterminate them."

Free will. A distant memory caught at her, she'd been a child but the words on the fine parchment in the archives building had gotten into her and had stayed. Free will was not only about choice, she remembered. It was about responsibility and accepting the consequences for that choice.

The fallen angel sitting on the other side of the table could be a tremendous source of information, she considered, looking at him from under her lashes as she sipped at her tea. _If_ he was willing to share, if his choice aligned with hers.

"Uriel told me that Dean Winchester had been sent to Hell in order to break the first Seal," she said, hesitating a little as she wondered if he knew the name. Everyone else certainly seemed to. "Why? What was so special about Dean?"

The Watcher nodded slowly, drinking his tea. "Yes, I heard the angels speak of him," he said. "What is special about him? The blood that flows in his veins, his ancestors, his heritage. The Winchesters originated in a line unbroken from Araquiel. Also a Watcher," he continued. "There is a prophecy for Lucifer's rising, for the breaking of the first Seal."

"_And it is written, that the first seal shall be broken when a Righteous man sheds blood in Hell. As he breaks, so shall it break_," Ellie said softly. "_For Heaven will reach down as Hell reaches up and the Righteous Man who begins it will be the only one who can end it._"

He looked at her, mouth open in surprise. Ellie had the feeling he was not a man who was easily surprised.

"That prophecy was lost for a long time."

"Not long enough," Ellie said, a little bitterly. "What does it mean?"

"Only those from the correct bloodline can break that Seal. Only the descendants of the line of Araquiel were able to fulfil the prophecy," Penemue told her. "Your friend was the only one they could find from that line, whom they were sure would break."

Ellie frowned, the crease deepening. "Dean's father made a deal with a demon as well. To save Dean's life, he exchanged himself."

"Yes. Azazel wanted him to break the first seal. My brethren weren't clear on why, but it may have been something personal between them. John Winchester spent a hundred years in Hell, but he didn't break." Penemue looked over the rim of his cup at her. "No one knows why. He was tortured long enough for most to become at least partly demonic. But he didn't."

Ellie closed her eyes, the words of the prophecy reverberating through her, along with their implications. "The breaking, the shedding of blood – the prophecy is referring to the torture of souls? "

Penemue looked at her sympathetically. "Yes."

She felt her heart sink. Would he still be the same man when she found a way to get him out? Would he be able to live with himself? His father's sacrifice had nearly broken him, what in god's name would this do? She pushed the thoughts away impatiently. She had to get him out first.

She leaned toward the Watcher, her eyes intent on his face. "Do you know how to get him out?"

"He is no longer in Hell. He was lifted by an angel who was apparently acting on the orders of God, a little over two months ago." Penemue put down his cup.

"On the orders of the same God who hasn't been around for over a thousand years?" Ellie asked tartly.

"Just so," Penemue said, his mouth curving up. "The manipulations of the lower Spheres suggest that whoever is controlling this has immense power."

"Like an archangel."

"Like an archangel," the Watcher agreed. "The second part to the prophecy – _the Righteous man who begins it is the only one who can finish it_. I believe that they think they will be able to change that, pervert it in some way."

Ellie bit her lip, her relief that he was out submerged by the realisation that more would be expected of him. "Pretty sure that Dean won't want to hear that either," she said, half to herself.

"That may be, but there are bigger things at stake here than a human's feelings, even one such as this man." Penemue leaned toward her. "The Cage of the Morning Star has many seals binding it, but only a certain number need be broken for Lucifer to be freed. Thirty-two of the Seals have already been broken. The demon Lilith only needs to break sixty-six in total for the Cage to be opened."

"And the angels are helping?"

"It would appear so. There is a boy, in a city in your country, who is a Seal." He looked at her, his face drawn. "He is in danger, right now. Lilith has been hunting him for the last month."

"A boy?" Ellie looked at him. "How do you know this?"

"I have been watching the lines since I first learned that the bloodline of Araquiel was involved," he told her. "And I have been listening."

"And this boy is a Seal?"

"The boy is nephilim. Travis Connor. His mother fell in love with Araquiel and he with her, and Travis is their son. The Seal will be broken if the boy can be corrupted, or if he is killed by a servant of God, before his seventh birthday. He must be saved."

"How could he be corrupted, if he's only six?" Ellie asked.

The Watcher's face was pinched with distaste as he said, "Lilith has a … cadre, you might say, of certain demons. They are specialists in fast torture – mental torture for the most part. They will stop at nothing and the methods are … proven."

"Which city?"

"Chicago."

Ellie's face tightened and she pulled her notebook from her backpack, taking a pen from the jar on the table and starting to write. "When's his birthday?"

"Four weeks from now."

She looked up at him. "That's not much time."

"No." Penemue laid his hand on hers. "There's another problem."

"Another one?" She kept her face expressionless, resisting the impulse to roll her eyes.

"The seraphim have been given orders that the boy must be killed. He must live to his seventh birthday, innocent and protected. Only then will the Seal remain intact."

"So both angels and demons are after this child?" Ellie leaned back, staring at him. "What's going on up there?"

The Watcher looked away. "A certain faction of my brothers want to bring on Armageddon. They want Michael to defeat Lucifer, cast him back to Hell and they believe that paradise on this plane will be theirs once it happens."

"That doesn't sound like an entirely bad thing," Ellie said slowly.

Penemue looked back at her. "Paradise on Earth for this faction means no humans."

"Ah." Ellie looked down at her notes. "Well."

"Yes." Penemue leaned back in the chair, watching her. "At this moment, Michael is still leading Heaven. But his brothers have been plotting behind his back for a long time, Miss Morgan. The Second War is coming, I have no doubt of that. Even though most of my brothers do not even believe in it."

Ellie thought of the histories she'd read that evening. When Lucifer had been defeated, had been thrown into the Pit and locked away there, Heaven had thought itself purged, cleansed of the infection of disobedience. They'd been wrong. She shook off the thought and focussed on her immediate problem.

"I'll need a safe place to take the child. Somewhere where no one will be able to find him, or see him."

"Yes." He reached for the paper on the table, and Ellie handed him her pen. "Here. This is the safest place. Take his mother as well. I will try and let Araquiel know."

Ellie nodded, glancing down at the address. Taylor's Ford, Nebraska.

* * *

_**November 26, 2008. Gary, Indiana**_

Dean watched the pump as it filled the car's tank with gas, leaning on the trunk and wondering what the hell they were going to do if Lilith already had the kid.

He had no doubt that Cas would kill the boy, if it came down to it, whether he wanted to or not. The obedience the angel'd told him about, that Anna had confirmed, seemed to bypass logic, compassion and reason completely.

The deep bass of his phone's ringtone boomed in his pocket and he pulled the hose out, setting it back on its cradle as he answered the call.

"Yeah?"

"Dean? It's Ellen," Ellen said on the other end of the line. On the highway, a rig's horn blared and Dean headed for the store, pressing the phone more tightly against his ear.

"Ellen – uh, hang on a sec," he told her, pushing through the glass door and looking around for his brother.

"Dean–"

"Hang on."

He saw Sam sitting at the window-side counter, his brother's face screwed up in a scowl as he talked to someone on his cell. Dean slowed down, crossing through the shelving instead of heading straight for him.

"What?" he said softly into the phone, standing by the fridges.

"We're tracking meteorological data, Dean," Bobby's voice came through, loud and clear and Dean jerked the phone away from his ear. "Demon signs, lots of 'em, and they're centring around Chicago."

"When you say, 'lots', you're, uh, talking–?"

"Hundreds," Ellen cut in, her voice sharp.

"Right." He peered around the corner of the shelf and saw Sam putting his phone into his pocket. "Uh, Sam needs to hear this."

He walked over to the counter, gesturing to his brother.

"S'Bobby," he muttered as he held the phone between them. "Demon signs all over Chicago."

"Bobby?"

"Sam, you gotta tell Dean he's gotta can this idea of getting that kid," Bobby said loudly, his voice clear from the cell's small speaker. "Looks like a fucking hellspawn convention from Kenosha down to Joliet."

"Uh–?" Sam turned to look at him.

"Doesn't matter," Dean said. "If we don't grab the kid, the angels are gunna kill him."

"Dean–!"

He hit the end button as he looked at Sam. "Whoops, went through a tunnel."

Sam's mouth twisted up slightly. "Alright, how're we going to handle this?"

"Carefully," Dean said, turning back to the store and heading for the register. "We'll go in after dark, look around, see what we see."

"And if they've already got him?"

"I don't know."

"What?"

"I don't know, alright?" Dean snapped over his shoulder. "I'm just making this up as I go."

* * *

_**3.00 pm, November 26, 2008. London, England.**_

It took Ellie a day and a half to get from Mount Sinai to Heathrow, the four-hour drive from the north of the peninsula to Sharm El-Sheikh in the south, and a flight via Cairo, the second leg stopping in London. She had a half-an-hour wait for the connecting direct flight to O'Hare.

Sitting in the airport lounge, feeling gritty and dishevelled, she tried to call Sam, swearing under her breath as the voice on the line told her the number had been disconnected. She dialled Bobby's number, then Rufus', then anyone else she could think of who knew the Winchesters. The numbers were either disconnects, or rang out unanswered.

One or two disconnected numbers might've been prudence, she thought, going to the airport restroom for a change of clothes and a wash. More meant that something had gone on while she'd been gone, it felt more like a rout than the hunters just being cautious. She looked at herself in the mirror, skin pale and washed out under the flat, fluorescent lighting, her eyes bruised looking from the shadows surrounding them. Stripping fast and bundling her clothes into her bag, she pulled out clean jeans, black shirt and close-fitting black jacket.

Her hair was filled with dust and she grimaced as she felt it, undoing the long braid, brushing it out vigorously and replaiting it. She could spend all day in the damned shower once the job was finished, she told herself firmly. Followed by several days sleeping.

_He was out_. The thought ambushed her and she shook it off, as she had the previous dozen times it'd slipped past her mental walls. If she thought too much about the ramifications of that simple fact, it would be a distraction that she couldn't afford to indulge.

Boarding the flight, she glanced at her watch. There would be enough time to get a rental and make a short stop to get what she needed. Portage Park wasn't far from O'Hare and Norridge was on the way. She hoped the traffic would be done with peak hour by the time she was in it.

* * *

_**9.00 pm. November 26, 2008. Chicago, Illinois.**_

The neighbourhood was on the north side and west, a divided tree-lined road, with a mix of houses and apartment blocks and decent street lighting. Sam peered at the map on his knees.

"4295 Lockwood Avenue," he muttered as Dean slowed down. "Should be this block."

Dean found a parking spot a few yards from the low-rise apartment building, cutting into the kerb and killing the lights and engine. He looked around at the quiet street then back to his brother.

"Well, we're here. Doesn't look like a demon war zone." He glanced at his watch. "Nine-thirty isn't too late for dropping by, is it?"

"Apartment 310." Sam opened his door and got out. "What do you want to take?"

"Everything we might need," he said prosaically, opening his door and walking to the rear of the car. He unlocked the trunk, lifting the false lid and propping it open with the sawn-off that'd somehow been designated with that job years ago, and looked at the contents of the deep, hidden well. Guns, shells and cartridges went into a canvas bag. The place would probably need some protection, he thought, grabbing a two-pound bag of salt, the goofer dust they'd picked up in Baton Rouge last year, and two aerosol cans of paint and adding them to the bag before he zipped it closed. He had one of Ruby's hex bags in his coat pocket, Sam had the other.

Shutting the trunk, he nodded to Sam and they moved across the sidewalk to the building's stoop, going through the front door and looking around the unlit foyer. Sam glanced up at the ceiling light and shook his head, his gaze shifting to his brother. Dean nodded. The place should've been lit. Either the janitor was a lazy sonofabitch, or the light had been taken out deliberately.

They climbed the stairs to the third floor slowly, guns out and fully alert. The demons could have beaten them there, though Dean thought the angel would've shown up to say something if they'd been too late.

He stopped on the landing and waited, Sam behind him. There was no sound in the building despite the early hour, no television sets, no music, no random sounds of laughter or … anything.

"I got a bad feeling about this," Sam said softly.

Dean nodded. He moved out into the hallway, watching to the end of the corridor and to their left, knowing that Sam watched to the right and behind them.

At the door of 310, they waited again, listening. There was no sound from the inside. All in all, not a good sign, he thought, putting the gear bag on the floor.

Crouching by the lock, he tucked his gun into his coat pocket and extracted the soft leather case holding his picks. The torsion wrench slipped into the lock and he felt for the tumblers, some distant part of his mind contemptuous of the flimsiness of the lock. There was a soft click as the tenon slipped free of the mortise.

Straightening up, he put the picks back into his pocket and pulled out his gun. He looked at Sam, and turned the knob, pushing the door wide and slipping inside, hearing his brother at his back and right, years of doing this giving them the freedom of knowing what the other would do and how and when and why without a need for discussion.

The apartment was in darkness. The light from the street came through the uncovered windows, revealing enough of the room for them to avoid the overturned furniture, the debris that littered the floor. Dean looked around, his heart sinking. Whatever'd happened here, they were too late.

Sam turned around and looked at him, jerking his head toward the hall that most likely led to the bedrooms, nodding at another door that was probably the kitchen.

He nodded and picked his way across the living room, walking warily toward the closed door at the end of the short hall.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

* * *

_**9.00 pm. November 26, 2008. O'Hare, Chicago.**_

The plane touched down bumpily, the pilot fighting a cross-wind and Ellie resignedly looked out the tiny square window, seeing the smeary lights of the airport through the standard fall of light rain that seemed to haunt the city at this time of year.

She'd slept through most of the eight-hour flight, taking the edge from the tiredness of driving, flying and waiting that had characterised the previous twenty-four hours, and as she crossed the concourse to the rental desks, she pulled out her phone and tried the contact numbers she had again, wondering how the hell she was going to find the brothers if everyone they'd known had all ditched their damned phones together. The desk had a couple of compacts and a luxury sedan and she decided on a compact, considering the defacing she'd probably have to do to it if the boy and his mother were still alive and at their apartment.

The boy could've already been taken, she thought, negotiating the traffic out of the airport and heading for Norridge. Either side might've found him. She thought again of what the Watcher had told her, factions in Heaven and power struggles in Hell and this world, her world, trapped in between them. Dean, trapped in between them.

What's dead should stay dead, he'd told her. He'd been right, she thought, chewing on her bottom lip as she took the back streets from the airport's exit road. Now, it looked like someone or something had been pushing and shoving in the background to ensure that hadn't happened. John Winchester's decision would've been easy to see. Michael had said that the man had talked of nothing but his sons, and she thought that faced with living and losing one, and dying, thinking both would live, there would've been no question for him as to which course to take. It can't have been that hard to see. Dean too had been easy to predict. He had only one guaranteed response when it came to his brother.

What would he think, or say, when he saw her again? The thought snuck in and she didn't try to push it aside. The truth was that she didn't know. She knew him, in some strangely intimate way that seemed more alchemical than anything else, but she didn't know that.

He'd asked her why, and she'd had an answer all ready for him, it wasn't even exactly a lie, more like a diversion, and even so she hadn't been able to use it. Telling him that she didn't want him to die had felt like a goddamned brass band announcement to her, but he'd taken it at face value. She still had the feeling he'd known that while it was truth, it wasn't the whole truth. Since she'd failed anyway, perhaps it wouldn't come up again.

She turned onto North Ozark and slowed down. The houses were identical, built by the same company at the same time and as alike as peas in a pod and she could never pick out a distinct enough landmark to mark the position of the witch's house, no matter how often she'd come here.

Seeing the driveway and Maurice's run-down station wagon parked in the drive, she turned in, stopping just behind it. Maurice Atelier had been almost at adept status on the Right-Hand Path when he'd made a bad decision and been exiled from his master and the community in which he'd practised. The penalty for his indiscretion was, as usual, death. He'd been hiding out from everyone in his particular business for four years now, scrounging a meagre living with cantrips and love potions, plied around the less-wealthy suburbs of the Windy City. She sometimes wondered if he'd've killed her on sight, the first time they'd met if he hadn't made that error in judgement and had been the adept he'd been trained as. Witches and hunters were not usually a good mix.

* * *

_**9.36 pm. Portage Park, Illinois.**_

The smell of sulphur was through the apartment but it got a lot stronger as Dean approached the closed door at the end of the hall. He cocked the automatic and turned the knob, shoving hard and sending the door crashing open as he strode in and flattened himself back against the wall, feeling with one hand for the light switch.

The distinctive yellow powder was dusted over most of the room's thrown-about and smashed-up contents, the reek overpoweringly strong. The queen-sized bed had been overturned, the mattress slashed and on the floor, the frame balanced on one corner against the opposite wall. Clothing, picture frames, books, a small television set, pillows and bed linen and shoes littered the floor, everything covered by a thin layer of soft, white feathers, the innards of an eviscerated feather-down pillow that was hanging almost empty from one edge of the window sill.

It took him several seconds to notice the foot, protruding past the edge of the mattress.

"Sam!"

He moved across the floor carefully, uncocking his gun and tucking it back into his pocket as he came around a piled up heap of debris and saw the dark-haired woman, lying on her back, blood flowing sluggishly from a number of cuts, grazes and slashes that patterned her forearms and the palms of her hands. He knelt beside her, turning her head as he saw the stains on the carpet beneath her, relieved to see the head wound had already stopped bleeding. Resting his fingertips against the artery in the side of her neck, he sucked in a breath as he felt a slow but steady pulse under them.

Behind him, there was a crunch as Sam stepped on broken glass and he looked around, waving a hand at the bed leaning against the wall. "Get that straightened and get her on it," he said, getting to his feet. "She's just knocked out, I think."

Sam nodded and pulled the mattress clear of where the frame would have to go as Dean walked to the head of the frame and felt the weight. He waited for his brother and they picked up the heavy base, turning it over and setting it down. Dean went to the woman, sliding his arms under her as Sam dragged the mattress from the wall and flipped it onto the frame, then walked out to the bathroom to find something to clean and dress the wounds. Carrying her carefully over the junk that still made an obstacle course of the floor, Dean laid her gently on the bare mattress, moving out of the way as Sam returned. He watched his brother lift one of the woman's arms, forehead wrinkled up as he studied the cuts and bruising.

"Defensive," Sam remarked expressionlessly. "Not more than five minutes ago, the blood's still flowing."

Dean heaved out an annoyed exhale and nodded. "I'll check the neighbours, whole building's quiet and this had to have been done when no one else could hear it," he said, gesturing at the mess surrounding them. "You think she just got knocked out?"

Sam nodded. "Yeah, took some skin off when they did it," he said, carefully turning her head to one side. He soaked another piece of gauze in the warm, antiseptic-filled water and kept cleaning out the cuts.

Dean turned and picked his way out of the room, leaving the lights off as he walked back through the apartment to the front door. He eased it open and checked the hall, slipping out and closing it behind him, walking down to the next door. The lock yielded easily to his picks and he walked inside, flicking on his flashlight and playing the beam around the room. The layout was identical but nothing had been disturbed here, lights all off, furniture neat and tidy and he thought the demons must've had a way of clearing the building in a pretty orderly fashion, something that the woman and her boy had missed out on.

Backing out, he closed and locked the door behind him and walked back down to the other apartment. Demons didn't usually give a tiny rat's ass if they woke the damned city with their smash-and-grabs, he thought. For some reason, they'd made this one look like a gas leak or fire alarm, cleared all the civilians out in a fast time. He wondered about the damage and wanton destruction in the woman's apartment. Trying to scare them? Or had the woman and her boy fought back?

He opened the door, and turned on his flashlight, playing it around the room slowly. In his mind's eye, he righted the furniture and the objects that were scattered everywhere, trying to see how they'd ended up where they had. Could've been a chase, around the rooms, he considered, turning the light off and heading back to the bedroom. Could've been a lot of things.

Sam was done with the woman's arms, both were tightly wrapped in bandages from wrist to elbow, a pile of blood-soaked gauze swabs on the floor beside him, and he glanced up as Dean came into the room.

"She hasn't moved."

"Looks like they called in a gas leak, or pulled a fire alarm, maybe," Dean said, looking around the room. "She must have been fighting back, maybe–"

The faint noise from the front of the apartment silenced him and he turned and hit the lights, plunging the bedroom into darkness as he heard the front door open and then close. Ghosting out of the room, he inched along the hall, backing into the deeper darkness of the bathroom doorway as he saw a shadowy form walk from the living room into the hall. His hand slid into his coat pocket, fingers curling around the Colt auto, drawing it out silently.

There was little more to be seen than a shadow among the darker shadows of the hall, the intruder moving silently, but as it passed him, Dean hit the bathroom's light switch, his gun levelled at the slight form in front of him, frozen and still mostly obscured by his own shadow.

"Hold it," he barked out. "Turn around, real slow. Hands where I can see them."

He stepped clear of the light behind him, frowning as it illuminated a small, slim figure, dressed in a matt black from head to foot, the features of the face hidden by the knit balaclava over the head, but the eyes, visible in the eyeholes, bright as they met his. Jade-green irises, flecked with gold and rimmed in a dark shade of blue, framed by thick, dark red lashes. Eyes he knew, or had once known, he thought, his pulse accelerating and his chest tightening.

It couldn't be. There was no way, none at all.

He felt a flashpoint of anger at the way he was being deceived and he stepped forward, pushing the barrel of the gun into the figure's ribs as he reached out and yanked the balaclava up and back.

"Hey, Dean," Ellie said, her voice soft.

He stared at her, the knit mask still in his hand, the gun still jammed against her side, taking in the familiar features, noting distantly that she was a bit thinner, there was another, more recent, scar on one cheekbone, but the older ones were still there, exactly as they'd been the last time he'd seen her, fine white lines that had never detracted, but had, in some way he couldn't really explain, enhanced her appearance, contrasting and complimenting the creamy pale skin with its smattering of freckles over nose and cheekbones.

"Ellie –?"

The word came out of his mouth barely audible, as if he'd lost all the air in his lungs. She was looking up at him, and he saw the corner of her mouth lift a little, apologetically, ruefully, her eyes filling with an expression that was beyond his ability to define, but made them warmer.

"Yeah," she said, shoulders lifting in a small shrug. "Really me."

He didn't think about moving, or even what he was going to do, he just did it, a reflex, a reaction that later he didn't want to think about too much.

The gun sagged to his side as he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tightly against him, the scent of her hair, of her skin, filling his nostrils and confirming for him that she was real – flesh – blood – bone – all real – touchable – holdable – his chin resting on the top of her head as she tucked her face against his coat. For an endless second, he didn't move, or speak, or think. In his arms, the woman he held was as still as he was.

"What the hell happened?"

He felt her shoulders and ribs rise and fall against the pressure of his arms, as she pulled in a deeper breath.

"It's a long story," she said, pulling away, looking down at the gun he still held in one hand. "You got salt? Holy water? Might as well get on with it."

He followed her gaze down to the gun and realised that he hadn't even thought of testing her, proving she was human, not another demon in her meatsuit or shifter or anything that could fuck him over with a representation that looked exactly like her. He nodded, his eyes cutting away from the barely formed question he could see in her eyes.

"Yeah," he said, dragging out the small, round silver flask and handing it to her, watching as she opened it and swallowed a mouthful. The slender switchblade he carried was silver and he pulled it out of his coat pocket and popped the blade, keeping his grimace internal as she held out her arm, sleeve pushed up and the cuff of the fine black leather glove pushed down. Her blood beaded along the edge of the fine cut, red in the bathroom light, no hint of charring where the blade touched her skin.

"Is the boy here?" she asked, pulling her sleeve down and looking past him to the closed door at the end of the hall.

He shook his head. "We got here too late," he said, the blade retracting into the haft with a snick. "They left his mother."

"We?" Ellie looked up at him. "Sam's here?"

"Yeah, he's here." He watched as her gaze fell away and wondered why she'd asked.

"Ellie –" Reaching out as she turned for the room, he caught her shoulder.

"After," she said, looking at him, half her face in shadow. "Okay?"

He let her go unwillingly, knowing she was right. It wasn't the time or the place for explanations.

Ellie pushed open the bedroom door and walked through, and beyond her, Dean saw his brother's head snap up, the gun in Sam's hand level and then fall as his mouth fell open.

"Wh-what – Ellie? How –? When –?"

Smiling in spite of himself, Dean shook his head as he followed her in. "After," he said to Sam.

Walking around Sam, Ellie stopped beside the edge of the bed and looked down at the woman lying there, one thumb gently lifting her eyelid. Standing behind her, Dean saw the blown pupil, not contracting even in the light. Ellie let the eyelid fall and drew a slim tube from her jacket pocket, unstoppering the end and holding it under the woman's nose for a few seconds.

She jerked away from it, eyelids fluttering and mouth opening, then sat up abruptly, her eyes flying open and her gaze veering wildly around the room. "Travis? Travis!"

Taking her hands, Ellie leaned forward. "Rachel? I'm Ellie Morgan," she said, her voice low and soothing. "This is Dean," she added, as Rachel's eyes focussed on her. "And his brother, Sam. We're here to help you. Do you remember what happened?"

Rachel's gaze shifted from Dean to Sam and back to Ellie. "Where's my son?"

"He wasn't here when we got here," Sam said carefully, glancing at Ellie.

"Do you remember what happened, Rachel?" Ellie repeated, keeping her gaze on the woman in front of her. Dean saw Rachel focus on the younger woman, regain a little control.

"Demons," the woman said, her face screwing up as the memory returned. "Four of them." She lifted her head and looked at Ellie. "How do you know my name?"

"A friend of mine, and of yours, sent me," Ellie told her. "Penemue said Travis was in danger. Can you contact Araquiel?"

Rachel shook her head. "No, he – he's in hiding."

Watching them, Dean wondered at what the hell Cas hadn't told them. Ellie seemed to know a lot more about the situation than he and Sam did.

"We have to get out of here," Ellie said, looking at him. "When they figure out their mistake, we have to be gone."

"What mistake?" he asked her, and she shook her head, the small crease appearing between her brows.

"Rachel, you can't come back here," she said to the other woman. "You need to pack up what you want to keep, for yourself and for Travis."

To Dean's surprise, the woman didn't argue. She got off the bed and went to the closet, kneeling to pull a bag from the mound of torn clothing on the floor inside of it and she began to pull clothes, photographs and a book or two from the mess.

"What mistake?" Sam repeated, dropping his voice as he looked over at Rachel.

"Later," Ellie said distractedly, turning to look at Dean. "The car still warded?"

He nodded.

"Good, because the piece of crap rental I've got isn't going to withstand too many close looks." She looked around the room. "What about the rest of the building?"

"They figured a way to get everyone out," Sam said, getting to his feet. "How're we going to find this kid?"

"What if Lilith already has him?" Dean's question jumped over the end of Sam's.

"She won't, not yet," Ellie said. "They knew it was Chicago, but not exactly where and there're hundreds of demons in the region. They'll have a meeting place, but not the final destination, and if we can intercept them before Lilith gets here, we've got a good chance of getting him out."

"Define 'good'," Dean said sarcastically.

She grinned at him. "Better than 'none at all'."

Turning away, she pulled her phone from her pocket, and dialled a number, moving into the hall as it connected. Dean looked at his brother.

"Did she tell you what happened?" Sam asked, his gaze remaining on the doorway.

Dean shook his head. "Said she'd explain after," he said, glancing back to Rachel.

"And you didn't argue?" Sam looked at him disbelievingly.

"She's right," Dean said, with a shrug. "We've got work to do right now."

"But –"

"Gotta place we can go to, safe enough to leave Rachel and with the necessary things we'll need to find Travis," Ellie interrupted, shoving her phone back in her pocket as she came back into the room. "How did you find out about this?"

"Long story," Dean said, rolling his eyes. "Angels told us."

He saw her face pinch up a little, her gaze cutting away sharply. "What?"

"Nothing," she said, shaking her head as she walked around the end of the bed to Rachel. "Rachel, we'll need something of Travis', a hair brush with his hair in it or a piece of unwashed clothing and a photograph."

The woman nodded without pausing in what she was doing, and again Dean wondered at her calm acceptance of three strangers in her home, following the abduction of her son by demons. He caught Sam's eye, seeing the same conclusion in his brother's face. Not a civilian. Not by a long shot.

* * *

The street was quiet and empty when they came out through the front door, Sam and Ellie covering both directions as Dean pulled out the keys and unlocked the car, getting into the driver's seat and starting the engine. He met Ellie's eyes in the rear view as she slid into the back after Rachel.

"Where to?"

"Head north," she told him. "Right on West Lawrence and back streets to Norridge, I'll tell you where to go."

He nodded and pulled out.

They'd gone perhaps a mile, zigging and zagging through the grid laid streets on Ellie's lefts and rights when Sam turned around in his seat and looked behind them.

"That what I think it is?" he asked, his voice low and tense.

Glancing in the side-mirror, Dean saw the streetlights of the roads, two or three blocks behind them, going out, a dark cloud seeming to block out the buildings and curtain the night.

"They following us?" he asked tensely.

"No, they're converging on the apartment," Ellis said certainly, glancing back and facing forward again. "They're looking for Rachel."

"About that –" Sam started to say, stopping when Ellie shook her head slightly at him, her gaze flicking pointedly to the woman beside her. Dean saw his brother subside in his seat and wondered why the demons would want the woman and why Ellie wouldn't say anything about it in front of her. Then he remembered the angel's words.

_If they can corrupt this boy … _

The kid's weak point was probably his mother, he thought, his gaze flicking involuntarily to the two women sitting in the back seat. And Ellie'd known it straight away. Rachel didn't need to hear about that. Didn't need to have that in her head while they went to find her son.

"This, uh, safe house," Sam said, turning to look at Ellie over the back of the seat. "Is it another hunter?"

"Uh, no," Ellie said, and Dean caught her look away from his brother in the rear view, her profile expressionless. "Not a hunter."

He exchanged a look with Sam, his brother's brow wrinkling up as he picked up the hesitation as well.

"Who is it, exactly?"

"Just a contact," Ellie said lightly, her gaze seemingly glued to the scenery racing past the window. "Very safe."

"You sure about this place?" he asked, catching her eyes in the rear view again.

She nodded. "Yeah, completely sure."

* * *

The single storey brick house was one of hundreds of identical homes in the suburb, a block from a big park and sporting facility, identical driveways running past the homes to identical garages built at the rear. Dean looked at the houses with a baffled irritation.

"Which one?"

"4733," Ellie told him. "It's about two blocks ahead of us."

4733 looked no different from any other house on the street, he thought as he turned the car into the drive on Ellie's instructions, following it past the house and parking at the rear.

The back door opened, spilling light over the concrete steps and yard, and he saw the silhouette of a man against the bright interior, beckoning to them to get inside.

"That your friend?" he asked Ellie as Sam and Rachel walked ahead of them.

"Yeah," she answered, and he noticed she wasn't looking at him.

"He know what we're doing?" Dean asked. "About the kid?"

"He knows what he needs to, nothing else," she said. "I told him that it's a demon abduction."

"So you don't trust him?" he pressed, hearing her prevarications in every response.

She slowed a little. "I don't trust anyone with everything," she said, turning to look at him steadily. "I trust him with what we have to do right now."

He watched her go into the house, uncertain if the comment had been aimed at him, or was a general statement. He thought there'd been an undercurrent there, something apart from the hedging she'd been doing about her contact. Shaking his head, he told himself it didn't matter. It would have to do, he realised, following her up the steps and into the house, because it was too late now to find anywhere else. Once the demons had seen that the kid's mom had gone, they'd be searching every street.

* * *

In the brightly lit kitchen, the man looked ordinary. Tall, thin, dressed in a black sweater and close-fitting black jeans, his hair was frizzy and longish and grey, his skin sallow under a grizzled-looking week's worth of stubble, his eyes a dark brown under black brows.

"Maurice, this is Dean and Sam Winchester, and Rachel Orland," Ellie said quickly, looking around as Dean came in. "We don't need that long, twenty-four hours, then we'll be out of your way."

"Winchester," Maurice said, his lip curling a little as he drew out the name. "You're really pushing the limits, Ellie."

She shrugged and nodded toward the hallway. "The guest bedroom?"

"Yeah, it's ready," Maurice said, waving a hand vaguely toward the interior door on the other side of the room and stepping back as Dean and Sam followed Rachel out of the kitchen. Dean glanced back as Maurice's hand snapped out and gripped Ellie's arm, halting her. He frowned as the man bent his head close to hers, his expression angry and his fingers biting down. Whatever it was he was saying, it was too low for Dean to hear, but the intention was clear.

"Hey. Problem?" he called back, shifting to the side of the hall to let his brother pass.

"No," Ellie said firmly, looking pointedly at Maurice, then turning her head to look up the hallway at him. "No problem."

"No problem," Maurice agreed reluctantly, letting her go. "The room's protected and I've put the pendulum in there."

Dean waited until she'd caught up, a glance at her face silencing his questions – for the moment, he amended to himself – once this was over, he wanted answers. A lot of them.

The bedroom was almost completely empty of furniture, a bland speckled cream carpet on the floor and bare white walls. In the centre, a large circular table stood, covered by a black silk cloth with a complex silver design painted on the fabric. Against one wall, an old-fashioned timber dresser held a variety of jars, bottles and bowls, dried and powdered and crystallised herbs and spices, minerals and bones and feathers filling them. The cupboard exuded a faint scent that reminded him of small town libraries and the attics of old houses in the summer. There was only one kind of person he knew of who would have this kind of stuff in their homes and he turned to look at Ellie, his expression flat.

"This guy's a witch?"

"Well, he's a practising Wiccan," she said, ignoring his tone as she spread out a map over the cloth. She walked to the cupboard and picked up a long, hard leather case, opening it. "But he's had enough experience with demons to know what he's doing with the protections we need."

"Dean."

He turned away from her, and looked at his brother, knowing without Sam having to say anything what he wanted to do.

"No," he told him. They'd just gotten rid of Ruby, and he was hoping he wouldn't have to see her again for a while.

He turned back to the table. Ellie had set up the pendulum, centring it over the map. Candles stood at each corner of the map and several bowls, some filled with herbs and powders and weird collections of objects, two empty. All the bowls were of a beaten metal.

"How do we find the kid?" he asked her impatiently.

"Ask around," Ellie told him, gesturing at the pendulum.

She took one of the empty bowls, filling it slowly with pinches or larger portions from the others, and adding several hairs from Travis' hairbrush when Rachel handed it to her.

Lighting the candles, she moved the bowl to one side, and closed her eyes, her voice dropping as she called out an invocation in Latin. Dean recognised parts of it, and the ritual, it was similar but not the same as the one Bobby'd used to find Lilith.

Opening her eyes, Ellie lit a match and dropped it into the bowl and the contents flashed into a searing sheet of violet flame then died away. The pendulum began to move, swinging at first from side to side, and then in a circle, the weight at the end moving out to the corners of the map as it circled faster and faster.

Dean shifted his gaze from the spinning pendulum to the red-haired woman watching it. _Alive_. He couldn't get his head around it, he thought uncomfortably. He'd spent too much time blaming himself for her death. He had too many damned questions that needed answers before he'd feel like he could accept it.

Slowly the pendulum decreased its arc and then moved abruptly to the left. It stopped, at a thirty degree angle, pointing to the Southside docks. Ellie picked up her flashlight and aligned it with the pendulum, leaning over the map with a pen. Where the point of the pendulum's shadow lay, she marked the location. Dean leaned over her shoulder to look closely at the location, memorising the address.

"He's alive," Ellie said as she turned to Rachel, the lines of tension gone from her face. "You can't come with us. Stay here. Try to rest. As soon as we've got Travis, we'll come here."

Rachel nodded, looking uncomfortably around the room.

"You'll be safe here, Rachel. This is as protected as we can make it. They won't find you here," Ellie added quietly. She turned to look at the brothers. "You ready?"

Nodding, Sam opened the door, going down the hall to the kitchen, Dean following him, hearing Ellie walking quietly behind. He looked around the empty room. "Where's the witch?"

Ellie snorted. "He went to get my rental. There's some gear in it that I want to take," she said. "You want to go ahead? See what you can see?"

Abruptly, Dean felt a sharp prickle at the back of his neck, a sense of déjà vu at the light suggestion.

"Hell, no," he growled at her. "That's what we did last time and you remember how that turned out?"

She ducked her head, looking away as Sam sat down at the kitchen table and looked at her. "And since we don't actually know how that turned out, since we've got some time, why don't you tell us?"

"An angel happened," she said, looking from him to his brother. "I wasn't much more than three hours from Cahokia and there was an angel in my truck and then I wasn't in it anymore –"

A horn tooted softly outside the kitchen and Dean exchanged a fast glance with his brother as Ellie turned away, going to the door and opening it.

"You think Cas knows about that?" Sam asked him quietly as he got to his feet.

"I don't know," he said, trying to remember everything the angel had told him, everything he'd said. "I don't think so."

"We thought he might have been played."

"Him and us both," Dean said sourly, walking out the door and down the steps to see Ellie rummaging through the trunk of the compact parked next to the Impala.

He hit the parking area at the same time as Maurice approached the steps, and stepped to one side. The witch stopped and looked at him.

"She said you won't try to kill me," he said without preamble. "Or tell others where I am."

Dean looked at him thoughtfully. "You hold up your end, and she'll be right."

Maurice looked past him, at Sam who'd stopped on the steps. "I've heard that your word is good," he said, turning back. "If I look after the woman and keep her safe, do I have it?"

The corner of Dean's mouth quirked a little, but he nodded, holding out his hand. "Yeah."

He nearly pulled it back as Maurice looked down at it as if it might bite him, gingerly taking it after seconds of hesitation. The witch let go after one shake, turning and walking past Sam into the house. They heard the lock click and several more turn and rattle after that.

"What was that?" Sam asked as he crossed to his brother.

"A deal," Dean said with a smirk. He turned to unlock the black car's trunk, as Ellie dropped the last bag on the ground and shut the trunk of the compact.

"Got room for these?" she asked, heaving a heavy black duffel onto one shoulder and picking up the second and her leather backpack with the other hand.

"What are they?" he asked, lifting the lid.

"Ordnance."

* * *

_**11.54 pm. November 26, 2008. South Side, Chicago, Illinois.**_

The South Side industrial complex had been written off for several years, too old to retool, the area too hard to get to, the river portage too tied up in graft and extortion for honest operators to get a look-in. Consisting of more than a dozen large buildings, parking lots and a decaying section of river docks, the perimeter fence was overgrown with weeds and the asphalt lots were cracked and pot-holed.

It took Dean a little over half an hour to get from the witch's house to the outskirts of the complex, taking back streets and doubling back when he thought someone might've been behind them too long. He parked the car in the shadow of a massive warehouse close by the fence and turned off the engine.

Sam turned in the front seat to look at him. "You want to take a look around first?"

Glancing back at Ellie, Dean shook his head. "No, we got one chance at this, we pussy-foot around and they make us and that'll be the end of it," he decided.

"You still got that knife, Ellie?" Sam turned to look at her, and she nodded.

"Thought you would have asked me for it long before now," she said.

"Got our own," he said, with a slight grin.

Ellie's gaze flicked to Dean's in the mirror as one brow lifted. "I didn't think they were that common."

"They're not," he said, with a look at his brother. "A demon gave it to us."

For a moment, he thought she was going to ask about that, but he saw her mouth compress a little as she shelved the question and opened the rear door.

"That'll help," was the only comment she made as she got out.

He wondered if telling her about Ruby would be a good idea. He didn't trust the demon who seemed to have convinced his brother that she was on their side, and he had the idea that Ellie would have some compelling arguments about working with a demon, arguments he'd already thought of himself.

The front doors squeaked open and clunked shut as the brothers got out, walking around to the trunk. Dean unlocked it, lifting the lid and passing Ellie's gear to her, then lifting the false lid and propping it open.

He glanced down as she unzipped the black duffel and pulled out a slim, curved bow, bracing one end against her hip as she slid the string on.

"A bow? Really?" he asked, reaching for the shotgun. "Sure you don't want a gun?"

She smiled up at him. "The arrows are made from _Bursera graveolens_," she told him, pulling a quiver from the bag. "Palo santo to you."

"That supposed to mean somethin' to me?" he asked.

Sam's brow furrowed up. "I've heard of that," he said. "That couple we met, the seven deadly sins after the gate opened. They had stakes made of palo santo, said it was toxic to demons."

Dean remembered them. Isaac and Tamara. Isaac had paid for his mistrust of other hunters with his life, he recalled. He looked at the bow and arrows with more respect.

"So you got a long-distance weapon for demons."

Ellie inclined her head. "Not very long range, not with this," she said, slipping the strap of the quiver over her shoulder. "I get a much better range with a long bow, but that's hard to carry around."

"What about a cross-bow?" he asked, looking into the well of the trunk. There were a couple of cross-bows in it. "Can we modify the arrows?"

She shook her head. "They're not hard enough. Something to think about for the future."

"If we have one," he muttered, pulling out a couple of boxes of the salt-and-iron-pellet filled shells and putting them into his coat's capacious pockets.

"Your optimism never fails to astound me," she said to him, half-smiling as she slid the long blade of the demon knife into its sheath and settled it flat against her flank.

"It's called being realistic," he told her sardonically. "It's how I've lived so long."

"Hmm, and I thought that was because of your impeccable character."

He snorted. "Yeah, that too."

On the other side of the trunk, Sam paused in loading his shotgun, looking at them and making an effort to hide his surprise. He hadn't heard that lightness in his brother's voice for a long time. It wasn't the same cocky bravado he remembered from before their father's death, but it was closer to his memories of Dean before everything had turned to shit, closer to the young man who'd still believed in what he was doing, in the fight he was fighting. He wondered if his brother was aware of that difference, or he considered, looking past Dean to the slender redhead who tossed her bag back into the trunk, the reason for it.

"You ready?" Dean turned around and looked at him, and Sam nodded.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

* * *

As Dean led them through the narrow alleyways between the complex's buildings, the light rain turned to snow, hard and granular, hitting their clothing with rattle as it began to coat the ground.

Looking around, he exhaled loudly in frustration.

Ellie stepped close, her hand touching his sleeve lightly. "We'll get a better view from the top," she said quietly and he followed her gaze to the steel ladder and gantry against the building wall next to them. He nodded, turning to Sam and jerking a thumb at the ladder as Ellie began to climb.

The gantry ran along one wall of the building, a shorter ladder leading to the shallow-gabled roof. Ellie took point, her lighter weight finding the structural supports, Dean and Sam following her exactly as she walked the metal sheets, bent slightly against the wind, to the other end of the roof.

Dropping beside her when she lay flat on the roof, Dean looked across the complex and wondered how easy it would be see anything as the snow increased, the wind eddying around the rooftops. He turned to see Ellie pull a pair of small field glasses from her pack and incrementally scan the buildings in view.

"There," she said, after a couple of minutes. She shifted to one elbow and handed him the glasses, pointing at a huge building several hundred yards from them. As he focussed the glasses, he saw what she had, a thin line of gold against the darkness of the building's eaves. The windows had been blacked out but not entirely and at this elevation he could see the top wasn't covered completely, letting that stripe through. He nodded to himself. Even demons didn't habitually work in the dark. He was surprised that they'd taken the trouble to cover the windows. Like the apartment building, it seemed too ordered for a demon mind.

"There's a gantry around that one too," Ellie said as he passed the glasses over her to Sam, seeing the small crease between her brows and knowing that she already had an idea of how to handle the situation.

"Sam and me go in from the ground?" he asked, looking at her profile, barely visible in the faint luminance from the snow. If she hadn't been here, he knew he wouldn't have climbed to the roof, would've searched around the complex on the ground, and probably found the building only if they'd run into a demon near it.

She nodded. "If there're two points of attack, we'll have surprise and confusion," she agreed, catching her lower lip between her teeth as she considered the possible layout in that high part of the building. "The shotgun should hold them still long enough for me to put an arrow in them and vice-versa," she added, a little distractedly as she stared at the window. "That look like it's at the end of the building to you?"

He turned to look and nodded. "This whole thing has been off," he said. "Getting the people out of that apartment block? Blacking out those windows? Demons don't care who sees their dirty work."

"Maybe it's not the demons who are planning this?"

He frowned at her, unable to read her expression in the dim light. "Who else?"

She didn't answer that and he looked at her, his expression drawn as he wondered again about what she knew and hadn't told them.

"How'd you know about the boy, Ellie?" he asked, very quietly. "All we got told was we had to get him before Lilith did."

"I was in Egypt, looking for – I was looking for something," she said reluctantly. "There was a man there who told me about the seal, about the boy and his mother."

"A man? You got a little more detail than that?"

"A lot," she said, turning her head to look at him. "More than we've got time to go into now."

Rolling onto her side, she pulled the long knife she'd taken from a demon from its sheath at the back of her hip and handed it to him, hilt first. He looked down at it, the back of his neck prickling slightly.

"Take it," she told him.

"You should hang onto that," he said. "You might need it."

"If you and Sam both have knives that can kill them, once they're on the floor, you'll be able to mop up," she argued softly, pushing the knife toward him. "I'll have a height advantage and reach, and while the arrows won't kill them, they'll disable, more effectively than holy water. It'll give me the time for an exorcism, even if they find me on the outside."

He couldn't see any holes in what she had in mind and it worried him because the last plan hadn't had any holes either, except the one no one had seen.

"You're making this sound too easy," he said accusingly, only half-joking.

She muffled her laugh against her arm, looking back at him after a second and shaking her head. "Sorry. I'll do better next time."

A reluctant smile twitched his mouth. She was easy to work with. Easy to be with. He'd thought that about her a few times on the jobs they'd worked together. Something had relaxed in him, some tightly wound-up spring had loosened a little when he'd recognised her eyes behind the black mask, had loosened more as they'd readied their gear by the car. He didn't know what it was or how or why it'd happened, just felt it in contrast to the discomfort of his certainty that she knew a lot more than she'd said to them, that she had her own reasons for not telling him about it.

As she started to wriggle back from the edge of the gable, Dean leaned closer to her, his voice pitched low.

"When we're finished here, you're gonna tell me everything, Ellie," he said, his eyes meeting hers. "All of it, right?"

The last of the humour disappeared from her face as she nodded. "Yeah."

* * *

Dean looked around uneasily at the side of the massive building. They'd given Ellie a five-minute head start and worked their way through the shadows and under the cover of the increasing snow flurries to the far end, finding a postern door in the big sliding doors.

"No guards," Sam muttered beside him, on one knee to pick the lock.

It bothered him as well. The kid was supposed to be the prize, why wasn't the place knee-deep in demons?

Sam straightened up, opening the door and stepping through and Dean looked around the whitening concrete parking lot again, no shapes visible in the swirls of fine snow and darkness, his neck prickling a little, but not enough to make him think about aborting the plan. He backed through the open door and shut it behind him, turning to look around the warehouse's interior.

The room they needed was high, either a second story, or a mezzanine level at one side of the building. Beside him, Sam nudged his shoulder and pointed. A narrow staircase led up to a gallery that ran around the walls, leaving the centre open.

Between the open gallery and the exterior wall, there was a single row of offices and glass-fronted conference rooms, mostly dark. Near the far end, he saw a strip of light, shining out from under one of the doors.

He nodded and looked at his watch. Four minutes had passed since they'd entered. Ellie would be expecting them through the door in another minute.

They moved up the stairs fast and walked along beside the rail, stopping to either side of the door where the light spilled over the floor. The seconds counted off his head, and he focussed on the door, on the lock, his brother moving into position. From the inside, they heard the crash of breaking glass and Sam kicked the door just above the lock, every ounce of his weight behind it.

* * *

Ellie made her way up the exterior stairs to the narrow catwalk just under the roof's edge. She found the room easily, the slivers of light from the edges of the painted surface like a neon sign in the surrounding darkness.

Kneeling on the metal walkway, she opened her pack and took out a bottle of holy water and a box of salt, slipping the quiver from her shoulder and pulling out the arrows to dip each of the heads into the water then encrust them in salt. The beauty of projectiles was their internal impact, she thought as she packed the bottle and box away again and rose to her feet. It was hard to ignore something burning on the inside. Glancing at her watch, she used the end of her bow to smash the window.

Drawing, aiming and firing was a single fluid motion, the layout of the room and the position of the demon-possessed meatsuits in it a single snapshot in her mind as the glass fell to the floor.

The first arrow pierced a demon standing to one side of the interior doorway, through the shoulder, pinning it to the wall. It was just opening its mouth to scream when the door burst inwards, the lock flying off and arching into the room, Sam barrelling through, firing the pump action into the demon standing in the middle of the room in front of him, wheeling around to plunge the thick, serrated knife into the demon pinned to the wall. Dean came in on Sam's heels, his shotgun's barrel sweeping the room and firing as the second of Ellie's arrows punched into the third demon's chest, the gun's range so close that the pellets had no time to spread and the hit pulverised most of the demon's head.

At the window, Ellie drew and fired again, the arrow burying itself to the feathers through another demon's throat, her gaze shifting across the room to her next target. Dean's knife was buried to the hilt in a meatsuit that was mostly shredded from a chest shot, and there were two more she could see, one of them standing by a long table, the single chair at its end holding the child.

She'd just nocked the next arrow on the string when she became aware that someone was standing beside her.

"Not the wildcard again," the deep voice, familiar from her nightmares, was close, behind her shoulder. "I knew I should have killed you when I had the chance."

She arched backwards as the angel's hand swept through the air where she'd been, a fast blow with the edge of his hand that would have broken her neck. Dropping her bow as she hit the cold metal gantry on her back, she rolled onto her stomach and eeled under the railing, catching the lowest rail to swing herself sideways under the walkway and letting go, hands outstretched to grasp anything, as Uriel dove for the railing and tried to catch her arm.

There wasn't much under the gantry, and she hit the strut below hard with her hip, the impact slowing her fall only slightly as gravity took her the fifteen feet down to the ground.

She felt the creak and grind as she hit, biting down hard on the scream that wanted to escape, rolling over and onto her knees, then feet as she struggled to pull air into her lungs. At least one rib, more likely two or three, she thought as she forced herself upright, were either cracked or badly bruised from the force of the fall, and the pain spread like thick syrup through her muscles and nerve endings, slowing her down, blurring the edges of her vision and hampering her reflexes.

She dug her hand into her small pack, her fingers fumbling as she searched for the slim metal bottle she carried everywhere now. When she felt the smooth, cold surface, she dragged it out, backing away from the building and pulling out the soft rubber stopper with her teeth. A single turn and the contents flew out in a circle around her. She wondered if there was enough in the bottle to do the job.

The angel appeared a few feet from her, and it took every bit of willpower she had not to turn and run when she saw him, his face barely visible in the darkness but it's familiarity filling her with dread, dreams and memory colliding in her mind's eye. _I did advise that it would be safer for everyone if you were dead_, his comment came back to her, along with the anger and grief she'd felt when he'd said it, flushing through her fear.

She took a small, backwards step, her gaze flicking to the ground, orienting herself with the side of the building. She felt the creak again in her chest at the movement, setting her jaw against it as she saw him notice her reaction.

"You're the one who pulled me from my truck," she said, stumbling a little as she took another step away from him.

Uriel walked slowly towards her, smiling condescendingly as he watched her slow, lurching backward progress. "Memories returned? That's unusual," he said, teeth flashing white in the darkness. "But none of this is going to be your problem soon, this time, I'll kill you quick."

Ellie stopped, letting her head drop forward and panting shallowly as she slipped her hand into the pocket of her jacket, and pulled out a small lighter, holding it concealed in her hand. She watched his feet and waited for him advance another step, hoping he'd think her spent and exhausted, no threat at all.

He stepped into the circle and she dove toward him, seeing him start from the corner of her eye. She hit the ground on her forearms, ignoring the bright stab of pain that took her breath away, the lighter snapping, and the flame it produced catching the thin trail of viscous oil that lay invisibly on the wet black asphalt.

The circle of fire leapt up immediately, and she was relieved to see that it _was_ a circle, unbroken and complete. The angel stood, open-mouthed with rage, in a cage of holy fire.

* * *

Dean dropped and rolled as the demon rushed him from the other side of the room, firing both barrels and watching it collapse to the floor, salt and iron driven into the meatsuit's flesh.

Behind him, Sam strode forward to thrust the thick serrated knife into the demon that was staggering toward him, an arrow protruding from both sides of its throat. He swung around as the body fell, marking the position of the demon holding the boy, and starting for it, then stopping abruptly as he heard a thud and his brother's grunt.

On the ceiling near the windows, Dean was pinned, spread-eagled, the demon holding him there standing beneath him and staring at Sam.

"Sam Winchester, the Chosen One!" it spat, lifting its hand and turning its wrist a little. On the ceiling, Dean groaned as he was squashed up against the concrete by the power holding him. Sam's mouth compressed and he reversed Ruby's knife, turning away and then spinning back, the knife flashing through the air.

The demon caught it, smiling at him and glancing at the knife disinterestedly before it threw it aside.

Shoving his shock aside, Sam pulled himself together, his eyes half-closing as he extended his hand toward the demon, and his mind reached for its essence, feeling for that familiar corruption.

He'd told Ruby he wouldn't drink the blood anymore. She'd told him he was out of shape, told him that he would never be powerful enough to destroy Lilith if he didn't. Through his mind's touch against the hellspawn in front of him, he could feel the strength of this demon; more powerful than any he'd attempted before, and he thought with a sinking feeling that Ruby might've been right.

_You can bitch about the situation later_, he berated himself, focussing every bit of concentration and fury he could find onto pulling the demon in front of him from its meatsuit.

* * *

_Thank you, Penemue_, Ellie thought gratefully, getting to her feet slowly and carefully, absently tucking the lighter back in her pocket.

"NO!" The angel's deep voice howled. "How could you know about this?"

Uriel stared at the flames, turning around and around in the circle, looking for a gap. Watching his face, the fear and disbelief distorting his features, Ellie had an idea that her nightmares about him would probably be a thing of the past now.

"I will kill you, slowly –"

Her hand pressed against her ribs, the look she gave him was unimpressed. "Yeah, well, you can get out of that first."

Uriel's eyes narrowed at her tone. "You will not be so lucky next time," he promised.

One dark red brow lifted mockingly. "Luck had nothing to do with it."

She bent to retrieve the now-empty bottle, slipping the stopper back into the neck, and pushing it back into the pack. "So … what are you doing here, exactly, Uriel? It is Uriel, isn't it? An angel, in league with demons?"

He glared at her behind the flames.

"No answers to the monkey's questions today, obviously." She slid the straps of her pack over her shoulders with a grimace of pain, closing her eyes and letting it wash through her until it eased.

"Let's see," she continued, forcing her voice to a bright and conversational patter. She opened her eyes and walked around the outside of the circle, the angel inside turning to follow her. "You're here to kill the nephilim … and break the Seal."

She wasn't above admitting to the feeling of satisfaction of seeing him trapped there, she decided as she studied him, but she didn't want him to see the full extent of her weakness either. He'd taken too much from her already.

"I'm a little surprised that you didn't just tell the demons to kill him at his home. Too obvious?" she asked, stopping, her head tilted to one side as she looked at him consideringly. "You upstairs boys have to be seen to be making an effort?"

Uriel's eyes narrowed again, his expression stony. "What do you know of it?"

"Oh, not much," she assured him. "You could call it a lucky guess. I do aim to find out more."

She turned away, walking as fast as she could to the building's main door, her breathing hissing in and out as her damaged ribs flexed with every step. If Uriel was overseeing the demon's kidnapping, they were in a lot more trouble than she'd thought.

* * *

She came through the door fast, slowing a little as she looked around and everything bar instinct and training shut down, the hunter she'd spent so much time becoming taking over. She saw Dean, pinned to the ceiling, Sam, eyes half-closed, hand extended, in some kind of mental struggle with the demon that held his brother, her knife lying on the floor under Dean and the ugly serrated knife Sam'd shown her earlier also on the floor, several yards from Sam.

To her right, the demon she'd pinned to the wall was dead, a long bloody wound in its chest. Another demon was slowly rising from the floor, its chest, throat and face peppered with salt crystals, pocked by iron pellets, wiping the blood off furiously, face twisted in pain. By the table and chair that held Travis in the centre of the room, a demon with her arrow through its chest stood, its head almost gone from a close-range encounter with Dean's shotgun, she guessed.

The scan of the room took less than a second and she was moving, going behind Sam and crossing the room in long strides. She beat the salt-encrusted demon to the bone-handled knife by inches, dropping and rolling over it and picking it up to thrust it between the demon's ribs as it fell onto her. The body jerked as the skeleton and muscles were lit from within, and Ellie turned her face away as the light poured out through its mouth and nose and eyes, pushing it off her and yanking out the knife when the luminance died.

The arrow-pierced demon ran toward her, and she scrambled backwards, half-rolling to get her feet under her as it swung a meaty fist into the side of her head, no time even to ride the blow when she was thrown across the room, her ribs flexing sickeningly as her back hit the steel supports of the interior wall. She fell to the floor, landing hard on her hands and knees, skinning her knuckles as she kept a tight hold of the knife.

The demon followed her, pulling the arrow from between its ribs, its fingers smoking and burning as it touched the holy wood. It let loose a high-pitched shriek as the arrow head, still coated with holy water and salt, was dragged back through the ragged wound, the sound contorted by the lack of nose and most of its mouth.

Ellie had started to rise, crouching as she got her feet under her when the boom of the gun filled her ears and the burning sensation as the bullet struck the side of her abdomen knocked her back against the wall. She staggered sideways, one arm flung out to catch the support and keep herself on her feet, her head lifting to see the demon holding a nine-mil automatic, the round black hole of the barrel pointed directly at her. Staring at it helplessly, she acknowledged that she wasn't going to be able to move fast enough to get clear this time.

Above the gun, the little remaining of the demon's face was distorted by what might have been a smile as it pulled the trigger again.

Click.

The hammer hitting the empty chamber was loud in the silence between them.

Click.

Ellie let out her breath. The gun was empty.

The demon stared down at the empty gun; grunting in fury and frustration, and threw it aside.

Watching as charcoal smoke writhed and filled the spaces in the skull where the face should've been as it walked toward her, she forced herself to straighten up, using the wall behind her as a brace, her hand gripping the serrated-edged knife tightly against her thigh. She was going to have one shot at this, she told herself, just the one chance and she couldn't fuck it up. She felt blood dripping down her stomach, soaking her shirt, her jeans, and forced herself to ignore it.

To her left, she distantly registered Sam's gasp of pain, but she couldn't spare him a glance, her attention solely focussed on the creature approaching her.

_The only way to survive a fight is to forget about your own death, Ellie._ Michael's voice spoke in her memory, clear and vivid. _Put it aside and focus on what you must do to win. Death is nothing, barely a doorway to a new level of experience. Do not fear it. Do not acknowledge it. Do not think about it. Do what you must do._

Everything disappeared with that thought, and time telescoped out as she waited for the demon, the seconds stretching out, getting longer and longer. She felt her heart beat steady, felt her lungs move easily as she drew in a deeper breath, felt the pain vanish. Her world narrowed down as each long second, discrete in itself, tightly concentrated on the now and the here.

The demon rushed her and she thrust back hard against the wall behind her, the force propelling her forward to meet it, the knife rising from her side. Bracing against the impact, she saw the demon's hesitation as it belatedly saw the indistinct flash of the blade between them. Then they collided and the knife slid in, almost without resistance, and the light of the demon burning up coruscated wildly through the holes and voids in the meatsuit.

* * *

Sam felt his concentration faltering as the pressure grew and several of the small capillaries in his skull and brain began to leak. The demon's mouth drew back in a wide smile and it released its hold on Dean, distracting him with the sight of his brother falling and hitting the floor. The demon strode forward, bending and picking up the long knife Dean had been using, turning and sweeping the blade in a flat arc toward Sam.

Stumbling backward from the attack awkwardly, his mind and body hammered from the intense strain of trying to pull the demon out without enough resources, Sam swayed, his vision greying at the edges as blood dripped from his nose, trickled slowly from the corner of one eye.

Ellie appeared in his peripheral vision, walking past him slowly, her face ashen, but her eyes bright.

"Get Travis, Sam," she said quietly as she moved in front of him, the thick knife in her hand held out, wide of her body, offering an opening.

Sam staggered back, lifting his arm to wipe the blood from his face as he moved around her. The demon's eyes following him for a moment, then flicking back to the knife in her hand, the smile returning to its face.

"What are you? The cavalry?" it asked her derisively, moving around her. Ellie pivoted in place, watching the way its eyes flicked between her face and the knife. The demon was powerful, the thought distant and devoid of emotion, powerful enough to be able to use psychokinesis, but the vessel it wore had never been in a fight in its life. It was uncoordinated, unsure of where its weight was, clumsy.

"Take a good look," she said, injecting contempt into her tone. "I'm the last thing you'll ever see."

"You're gutshot and broken," the demon told her, the eyes black and flat from corner to corner, moving over her body, seeing the damage.

"And I'll still kill you."

It lunged abruptly for her, the long, fine blade of the knife plunging toward her chest. Swayed to one side, she watched it follow the feint and she moved backward, as fast as it came toward her, waiting for the over-extension and over-balance, her gaze fixed on its chest as it did. She stepped back in, driving the serrated knife in her hand upward through the ribs, feeling the gusting exhale of its breath over her face as she twisted the thick blade into its heart. The body shook and shuddered on the point of the knife, the demon inside dying with a molten flare of light, the weight of the meatsuit almost dragging her over as she tried to free the knife from its ribs with a hand shaking with fatigue.

"Sam?" She stayed on one knee, breathing as deeply as she could, then turned around, her gaze sweeping the room. "You got him?"

"Yep, I've got him," Sam croaked, carrying Travis in his arms, the boy's weight no burden, though his head was throbbing and he could feel his muscles trembling with fatigue. "Where's Dean?"

Getting to her feet, Ellie walked unsteadily across the room to where the unconscious hunter was lying on the floor, his arm awkwardly twisted out beside him.

"Dammit," she muttered under her breath, kneeling beside him.

"Come on, Dean, wake up," she insisted, turning his head and seeing the long cut that ran from his forehead into his hair. Not a concussion, she thought, not as well as the dislocation. She felt in her pocket for the salts, pulling out the small tube and opening it, her hand sliding under the back of his head as she waved the tube under his nose.

"Dean, come on, get up, we're running out of time."

His eyelids fluttered and he jerked in reaction as he came to, his eyes darkening immediately, face twisting into a grimace of pain, sweat beading over his forehead.

"Bad news, you've dislocated your shoulder," she told him, feeling her body's sharp reminders of her own injuries as she helped him to get to his knees. Just this last little bit, she thought, setting her teeth together as she tried to ignore it, then she could rest. She glanced over her shoulder at Sam.

"Sam, can you take Travis down to the car now and we'll follow as fast as we can?"

Sam nodded and headed for the door. The boy lay quietly in his arms, in shock, Sam suspected. He looked back over his shoulder, seeing Ellie brace herself and drag Dean to his feet.

"Can't believe I've done this again," Dean mumbled through clenched teeth, his face tight against the intensifying pain of the stretched-out muscles and tendons. "Only h-h-happened last week."

"That's probably why it came out again," Ellie told him disparagingly. She gently probed the cut on his head with her fingers. "This hurting?"

"Could be. I can't tell because my fucking shoulder's on fire." He looked sideways at her as she took his good arm and draped it over her shoulder, his gaze dropping down to the spreading stain of blood on her stomach. "Ellie, you're –"

"We can trade war stories when we're out," she cut him off tersely. "It doesn't feel bad."

"Where's Sam?"

"Sam's ahead of us, he's got Travis. We have to get out of here right now; we'll put the shoulder back at the car."

He nodded, and she tightened her grip around him, feeling him trying to keep his weight off her as they headed for the door. _Job's not over until you're home with the door locked_, she reminded herself tartly, feeling her knees wobble under her. _Keep going._

They made it almost halfway down the gallery's narrow length. Then the walls of the building shook and darkness filled the warehouse's interior as demons ran and smoked up the stairs toward them.

* * *

Sam put Travis into the back seat of the Impala and slid into the driver's seat. He started the engine, cranking up the heater and flicking on the wipers to clear the windshield, peering through it as the snow was pushed aside for the shapes he thought had been right behind him.

Over the wind, he heard someone shouting and he cut the engine instantly, opening the door and getting out. From the direction of the buildings, there was a muted roar, followed by a lot more shouting, the sounds muffled by the swirling snow and the buildings in between. He froze, his head snapping around to look at the boy in the back seat as he realised that Ellie and his brother weren't going to be coming out of the darkness.

They'd been trapped. He forced himself to accept that, fighting against his first and strongest instinct to leave Travis here, to go in blazing and save them.

It was the wrong instinct, he knew. He couldn't risk leaving the boy here, even with the warding that covered the car. If he was found, and taken again, everything they'd done would be for nothing and Lucifer's cage would be another step closer to being opened.

He closed his eyes, his face screwing up as he slid back into the driver's seat, pulling the door shut. His hand moved to the ignition and he started the engine again, pulling out and heading west for the witch's house.

He would get the boy to safety, then come back, he told himself, his body rigid with tension as he drove away from his brother, leaving them in the demons' hands.

* * *

Dean lifted his head to look blearily around the room, recognising that he was rapidly approaching a state of mind where he wouldn't care if he died so long as the damned pain was gone. His shoulder was white-hot, the nerves frying, there was an incessant pounding on one side of his head, matching the beat of his heart and he thought the last punch by the demon beside him might've loosened a tooth. For some reason, maybe because he hadn't had the option of dying, agony had been easier to deal with in Hell.

"Winchester!" The demon leader stopped dead in front of him, its expression twisted up in fury. "Where's the kid?!"

"What kid?" Dean asked, sucking in a shallow breath.

The demon standing next to him slammed a fist against the shoulder joint, and he lost the breath in a long wheezing effort to keep the scream locked in his throat.

"You wanna try that again?" the leader asked him, and he lifted his head, staring at him expressionlessly.

"What about you, girl?" The leader turned away, wheeling around to face Ellie. She was held in between two demons, her head hanging forward, her hair loosened from the struggle with the demons on the gallery, falling around her face, and in the bright overhead light, Dean could see the sheen on her clothes where the blood had soaked in.

Her gaze remained fixed on the floor and the leader reached around her head, grabbing a handful of hair and jerking her head up.

"Don't make me mad, not today," it warned her softly. "Where's the kid?"

"He got away," she said, her face white, the freckles standing out against the pallor, her expression carefully neutral as she looked past its shoulder. "While we were fighting, I guess."

"Oh, you two are a couple of comedians, aren't you?" the leader snapped, half-turning away from her. He swung back a second later and his fist lashed out, slamming into the side of her face under the cheekbone, throwing her back against the grip of the demons holding her. Both shifted their holds on her arms to keep her on her feet when her head lolled to the side and her knees gave way.

Dean dropped his gaze as the leader turned to look at him, staring at the floor fixedly. He reminded himself that the demons didn't need any more of a reason to hurt her if they thought it would make him talk.

"Tate, gimme your knife," the leader said. "Let's have some fun."

Looking up, he saw the demon watching him, a smile stretching out its mouth. "Got something to say, Winchester?" it asked, taking the knife and looking at the edge. "You were the prodigy down in the pit, Dean, maybe you'd like to show us how it's done?"

Dean tensed, shutting out pain and thought completely as he readied himself to move. It would have be fast, he thought, neither of the demons holding him considered him much of a threat, their grip light. They'd probably both die but it would be better than this.

The leader raised its brows at him. "No? Well, I don't mind if I do," it said, turning back to Ellie, his hand fisting in her hair and pulling her head up and back, the long line of her throat exposed.

The point of the knife pressed under her jaw, and Dean saw a bead of blood seep around the tip. He took a breath and flicked a glance at the demon to his left.

"Stand down!"

The barked command froze everyone in the room, and Dean turned his head, seeing a tall, well-dressed man in a suit standing in the doorway, silvering dark hair combed back from a square, uncompromisingly severe face.

"Our prisoners, Monk, we'll do what we like with them! They've snatched the bloody kid!" the leader said, letting the blade fall to his side as he stared belligerently at the demon.

"You're relieved of this command, Tennant," Monk snapped, striding into the room and up to the leader.

"For fuck's sake, it's not the bleeding military, you bloody git!"

"Lilith is on her way."

The reaction of the demons didn't make him feel any better, Dean thought as he watched the unconscious shuffle of feet around the room, many of them inching toward the door.

"Put them in one of the rooms and leave them," Monk continued coldly to the demons holding them. "Lilith prefers to handle questioning herself."

The leader scowled and turned away, and the demons to either side of Dean pushed him forward, jogging the dislocation again, the pain greying out his vision as he stumbled toward the door. When he was shoved to the left, he saw Ellie behind him, the demons half-carrying, half-dragging her along, her body limp.

Lilith, he thought, remembering the breathless little-girl whisper that had come from Ruby's mouth as she'd let in the hellhounds.

Good times.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

* * *

Dean leaned back against the wall, his eyes screwed shut, sweat running down his face and neck, soaking his shirt. His shoulder was a searing wall of agony, the tendons and muscles stretched out too far, for too long.

The dislocation was anterior, the joint sticking out in front of his body and he opened his eyes, blinking the sweat from his lashes as he looked around the empty, dusty room for any kind of protruding edge he could use to put it back. There was nothing he could see, just smooth, empty, blank walls, even the window frames were flush to the lining, and he dragged in a deep breath, trying to force his awareness of the pain to one side where it wouldn't drain every atom of energy he had.

Turning his head, he looked down at Ellie. She was lying on the floor by his feet, where the demons had thrown her when they'd been brought here and was still unconscious, her bright copper hair spread out around her. The dark stain of blood over her torso was still spreading, but more slowly now and he couldn't think of a way he could do anything about it with one arm and piss-poor concentration. He was pretty sure she'd been gutshot, the thought adding to his general agony.

_C'mon_, he told himself, eyes squeezing shut as the pain leaked past his control, _think of something_. _Do fucking _something_!_

* * *

On the floor, Ellie stirred, keeping her eyes closed as she listened first. She could hear a low, whistling breath somewhere close by, and she opened her eyes, knowing whose breath it had to be.

Her head throbbed, the centre of the pain on the left side of her face and she raised her hand to touch the rapidly swelling contusion under her cheekbone, flinching a little as her fingertips explored it; maybe another fracture, along the line of an older one.

Pushing herself up, her breath hissed softly between her teeth as the fractured ribs made their presence known and she felt wet and sticky from the stomach down to mid-thigh, the mushy liquid feel accompanied by a localised burning on her stomach. She remembered the gunshot wound. Quite the list today, she thought sourly.

She turned over slowly and carefully, and looked up, seeing Dean standing beside her, his head tipped back as he leaned against the wall. From the set of his jaw, he was almost at the point where he was ready to start screaming with the pain, she thought. She got her knees under her, crawling to the wall beside him, and leaned against it to climb to her feet.

"Better do something about that shoulder," she said softly, and his eyes snapped open.

She stepped in front of him and carefully raised his left hand, holding the arm bent at the elbow. "Sit down, and turn around, side on to the wall, Dean."

He nodded and eased his frame down to the ground, turning to lean his right side against the wall. She gently pushed his bent arm inwards towards his chest, then began to draw it out again, lifting and rotating the joint. Dean closed his eyes, his teeth grinding into each other as the muscles were stretched further, and Ellie's gaze flicked to him as she shifted her grip on his elbow and slid her right hand up his arm. She could put her weight behind her now; the shoulder socket was much lower.

"Hold on, this is going to hurt like a bitch," she said, drawing the arm out, pressing the joint and his elbow hard as she felt for the socket. Even with the added advantage of being above it, it took all of her weight and strength to force the joint past the edge, ribs and abdomen aching then burning as she forced herself to keep pushing. When it slipped back into the socket, she rocked back, wiping the damp sweat from her forehead and panting a little as she tried to let the pain wash through her.

Dean's breath rushed out in a long exhale as the fierce agony surrounding his shoulder eased. She watched him, knowing from experience that what was left was just the memory of it, in sore and abused muscles. He let his head fall forward, sucking in deep lungfuls of air, then moved his arm cautiously around in the socket, closing his hand into a fist, giving a little nod to himself as the arm reluctantly obeyed.

"Thanks." He turned his head, looking at her, his gaze dropping to the fresh sheen on her shirt. "Let me look at that," he said, gesturing to her stomach.

Ellie let out her breath slowly, catching the bottom of her jacket with one hand as she leaned on the other and lifting it higher. He peered at the red film over her skin and shook his head, his voice hard as he said, "You're losing too much blood."

He rolled onto his knees, twisting around to face her and looking at the floor. "Lie down, Ellie."

She eased herself to the floor, her jeans and shirt clammy and sticking to her skin, the heavy metallic scent of blood filling her nostrils every time she moved. Letting the hem of the jacket drop, she watched his face as he leaned over her.

He unzipped her jacket awkwardly, mostly one-handed, pulling the edges away from her. Under it, she wore a close-fitting black long-sleeved shirt and she could feel the saturation of the material through the bottom half. She looked down, watching as he lifted the hem of the soaked shirt carefully, pulling it away from her skin.

"Sonofabitch," he said, his gaze lifting to meet hers. "Can't see a thing. Hold this up."

Feeling for his hand, she took the edge from him and pulled it up, the air cold on her skin. Her face screwed up a little as she felt moisture trickle from the sodden fabric scrunched in her hand over her fingers and ribs.

Dean pulled off his coat and unbuttoned the long-sleeved flannel shirt he wore under it, lifting the bottom of his tee shirt to his mouth, and tearing a ragged strip off with his teeth. Wadding it up slightly, he began to wipe away the blood, finding the entry hole almost immediately. Ellie bit her lip, trying to stifle the moan that filled her throat as the cloth touched the open edges of the wound, seeing him flinch slightly and the wadded shirt lifted instantly as he noticed her reaction.

"I gotta wipe this clean," he said, his tone half-apologetic, half-determined and she nodded, wanting to tell him to do whatever he had to but unable to get the words out past the nauseating waves of pain that seemed to be rising from the exposed wound.

He seemed to understand, she thought, watching the muscle at the point of his jaw jump as he set his teeth and kept going. His face was expressionless, but his hands were very gentle as he mopped over her skin, pausing after a minute to rip another strip from his tee shirt and continue. Ellie looked up at the ceiling, listening, wondering vaguely how long they'd have before the demons returned for them, and what, she considered as the last memory returned of their capture, had stopped them from being pulled to pieces.

"What happened?" she asked him softly.

He didn't look up, but she saw his mouth compress a little, lips thinning out. "Another demon showed up, a few minutes after you were clocked," he said. "Told the demons holding us to leave us in here, 'cause Lilith's on her way."

The name of the demon sent a shiver down her back, and she felt his hand stop moving, the fingertips rest on her skin for a moment before he took a deeper breath and kept wiping.

His exhale was loud, and she heard him swear softly to himself, the mutter filled with relief.

"Got it," he said, looking at her. "In and out. Must have gone through when you were bending over, just through a fold in the skin."

"Lucky." Ellie smiled tiredly, closing her eyes.

"Unbelievably."

She heard a depth of feeling in his voice, but couldn't make the effort to open her eyes to see the expression that went with it. In and out explained the relatively small amount of pain, she thought, and the relatively small amount of blood she'd lost. The bullet would've cauterised as it went through. It would heal.

She listened to the quiet sounds, his breathing and the burr of the cloth over her skin, the wet splat as he dropped another soaked piece. Letting herself drift a little, she could feel the odd grinding sensation in her chest as she inhaled and exhaled, pain surrounding it but not the stabbing agony of a broken end and no bubbling sensation in her lungs. She thought that maybe she'd got away with a couple of cracked ribs. The cloth moved over her abdomen steadily, and she listened to the occasional rip of fabric as he tore more of his shirt apart.

"Bloodflow is slowing down," he said a minute or five later, and she opened her eyes, seeing him pull his tee shirt over his head, ripping it up the back. He spread the thickly wadded-up pieces over both holes and her belly-button, turning his head to look at her. "Hold this, hard here, alright?"

Ellie pressed her hand down over the pieces, watching him pick up the flannel shirt and tear the sleeves out. His hands and forearms were smeared with red.

"Thanks," she said. He glanced down at her, his expression unreadable, turning his attention back to the shirt after a second.

Knotting the two sleeves together, he snapped them taut, flattening the doubled length. "Can you lift your hips, just a bit?"

Bracing her feet against the floor, Ellie lifted her pelvis, trying to keep her face blank as chest and torso complained together, and Dean slid the end of the knotted sleeves under her, drawing the two ends together over her hand.

"Okay, got it," he said, pulling them tighter as she moved her hand away, until the makeshift bandage held the padding in place. "What's wrong with your ribs?"

"Mmm, fell off the catwalk," she admitted. "I think I cracked one or two."

He looked down at her, one brow lifted. "Fell off?"

"Mmm."

"Where's it hurt?"

He lifted the hem of her shirt higher, and Ellie rolled slightly to her left. "Somewhere in the middle, on the back," she told him.

"Bruising there," he said, and she felt his hand skate lightly over her skin, fingertips very gently probing. "Breathe in."

Pulling in as deep a breath as she could manage, she held it for a second then let it out.

"Nothing feels like it's where it shouldn't be," he said to her, easing her shirt down over the dressing around her stomach. "You cold?"

"Yeah, a little, just reaction."

He drew the two edges of the jacket together and zipped it up, turning to pick up the sleeveless shirt and put it back on. Ellie blinked in surprise when he picked up his coat and spread it over her. The warehouse was like a fridge, the outside temperatures seeping in through the bare metal and concrete walls.

"Dean, it's freezing, keep it," she said, pushing it back to him.

"Cold? Me? Nah. Naturally hot-blooded," he said, mouth curving into a slightly suggestive smile as he pushed it back over her. She looked away, half-exasperated at the response, half-amused by his ready bravado.

"Turn your head a bit," he said, his smile fading as he stared at the side of her face and leaned close, his fingers catching her jaw to turn her face back to him. "This hurt?"

"There's an old fracture underneath. It probably opened up," she told him, leaning back a little, his hold on her slipping. "It'll be alright."

She saw him nod, his brows drawing together a little as he looked down at the blood covering his hands and wiped them ineffectually against the sides of his jeans. He moved back to the wall, leaning against it and she shifted slightly under his coat, glad of the warmth, closing her eyes.

"So," he said, his tone light. "Since we're just waitin' around, you want to tell me what the hell happened in April? Bobby told us that your truck had crashed, said the cops were saying the driver burned to death."

She heard the change in his voice, a very slight roughening along the edge.

"We thought you were dead, Ellie. We _knew_ you were dead. There wasn't anything left of the truck to bury or scatter."

"Uriel was the angel that was in my truck," Ellie told him, her breath gusting out softly. Above her, she heard him drag in a breath at the name. "You know him?"

"Not socially," Dean's tone was sour.

"He … did something, I think, to my memories, because for a long time I didn't remember anything but watching you die–" she said.

"You saw that?"

"I saw you and Sam and who I thought was Ruby, Sam's friend, in a room, then I realised it wasn't Ruby and she–" She stopped, pushing back at the memories of watching her open the doors and let the hounds in, watching what they'd done to him. Those memories crowded up in her throat and she forced her voice to become even, matter-of-fact. "And then I saw her try to kill Sam, but whatever it was she was doing had no effect on him."

His breath hissed in again and she opened her eyes, tilting her head a little to look at his face. "You knew about that?"

"In general," he said, his eyes dark. "Sam didn't – we haven't talked about it that much. What did you see?"

"She was generating some kind of power, and it flooded out of her, a white light, burning the colour out of everything in the room. Sam was on the floor, his arms over his head …" she said, recalling the memory in as much detail as she could. "I got the impression he thought he was going to die, but he didn't. The light didn't touch him and when she let it go, he got up and faced her."

"And then?"

"He picked up the knife, the thick one, and she smoked out of the woman and disappeared into a vent," she said.

"That's all you remember?" he asked.

"Until quite recently, yeah," she said, closing her eyes again, her emotions pressing up close. It was hard to look at him, sometimes, to believe. "I had dreams, nightmares, about other things, but I didn't know if they were real or not, or where or how they fit into that."

"How'd it come back?"

"Uh, I caught a bullet, while I was – uh, on a case," she said, abruptly aware that he would be able to read too much into what she'd done if she told him everything. "It got infected and a lot came back with the fever. I thought they were dreams, at first, but then I started to remember more. And I recognised him tonight."

"Uriel was here?" His voice was sharp enough to make her flinch slightly, her eyes flying open as she looked up at him.

"On the catwalk," she said. "He appeared there after I'd shot about three of the arrows."

"He pushed you off?"

"No, he tried to kill me, and I jumped," she said.

"Tried to – wait a minute," he said, and she saw him frown, shaking his head a little. "He's an angel – he 'tries' to kill you, you're dead."

She smiled, the corner of her mouth tucking in. "Well, I had an advantage there."

"An advantage?" His brows shot up. "What kind of advantage do you have over an angel?"

"I – I was in Egypt, until the day before yesterday, looking for lore on angels. I met someone there. A man," she told him, looking away from his eyes. "Not really a man, he's an angel, a fallen one."

"A fallen angel?" Dean repeated and she tilted her head again to look at him, smiling at the doubt in his tone.

"You must've heard of them? Lucifer's one," she said, her tone light.

"Oh yeah, I heard of fallen angels," he said, his voice tight suddenly. "We met one too."

"Where?"

"Here, in, uh, I mean in Maryland, she busted out of a psych ward and, well, it's a long story," he said, lifting his right hand and gesturing vaguely.

"She Fell deliberately?"

"Said she did," he said, his tone too casual.

Ellie looked at the ceiling, hearing the feelings surrounding the memory that he wasn't letting out. She wanted to ask him about it, but she couldn't. He might tell her, she thought, but he wouldn't want to. Whatever scars he had were still very fresh. Someday she'd ask, when he'd had a chance to deal.

"Penemue fell voluntarily, before the war. He wanted to teach humanity."

"Oh, a good guy?" Dean asked derisively.

"One of them," she agreed noncommittally. "He told me about – he told me about a lot of things, Dean, things you need to know, that Sam needs to know – but one of the things he told me about was how to trap an angel."

"Trap … an angel?"

"Uriel's standing in a circle of fire outside this building right now," she said, just the smallest thread of satisfaction in her voice at the thought. "There're other things too – the boy, Travis? He's nephilim, Penemue said –"

He sounded tired as he said, "Okay, I'll bite, what's nephilim?"

"Half-human, half-angel," she said. "His mother, Rachel, is human. His father is another fallen angel, called Araquiel."

"That's who you were talking about getting in contact with, back at her apartment?"

She nodded. "If she can, or if Penemue can, he can keep them protected until after Travis' birthday." She bit her lip, wondering how much to tell him about the angels now. "Dean, there's something else. Penemue said that Travis could be corrupted by the demons, or he could be killed – both acts would break the Seal."

"What?"

"Who told you about Travis?"

"An angel," he said, and she heard a hesitation before he continued, "The angel that pulled me out of the pit."

"He's either lying or doesn't know the full deal," she told him, seeing his expression darken as he took that in. "Do you trust him?"

"How d'you know your source is on the level?" he asked, his tone defensive, and she saw he didn't want to believe he'd been lied to, maybe because it wasn't the first time.

"I don't," she admitted readily. "Not a hundred percent. I just can't see a motivation for him to lie to me. He didn't have to tell me anything."

She watched his face close up, his gaze cut away. It was the tip of the iceberg, really, she thought, the duplicity of angels in this situation. She had no idea how to raise the subject of the prophecy, not even to ask him if he thought he was the one it spoke of; or what she'd learned about his father, or what she feared about Sam, or for that matter, how to figure out if they could trust the angel who seemed to be running him and his brother.

"Christ, Ellie … fallen angels, half-angels, angel traps," Dean said, looking down at her. "The hell you been doing?"

She let out a soft exhale, turning her head away from him. "I was looking for answers. Why an angel would want to stop me from killing Lilith. Why he didn't just kill me," she told him. "What they wanted from you in Hell," she added, more quietly. "And why you were raised by the angels."

He frowned and she saw him swallow against some emotion he couldn't let out. "Cas – uh, Castiel, the angel who – uh – pulled me out," he said uncomfortably, ducking his head. "He said – he said God had work for me."

Ellie felt her heart constrict, hearing the mix of pain and hope that underlaid his words. "What kind of work?"

"I don't know," he said, lifting his right shoulder in a shrug. "Stopping the seals from being broken? Stopping the devil from getting out?" He shook his head. "I don't know, they're pretty vague on the details."

"Devil's in the details," she said softly, wondering what they were doing to him. "Penemue said that some of the angels, a faction in Heaven, is trying to release Lucifer. He said they'd try and kill Travis because that would break the Seal."

From his silence, Ellie wondered if he'd already suspected that some of the angels were not playing on their team. His face was drawn and pale, and he looked like he really didn't want to hear any more.

"You know that Lilith is breaking the Seals?" Dean rubbed his hand over his face. "She's up to thirty, I think?"

"Yeah, when she reaches sixty six, the cage holding Lucifer will be opened." She shifted slightly, pressing harder against the wound in her abdomen as it burned below the bandage.

"Why does this fallen angel think that the angels are helping the demons?" he asked after a few minutes.

"He said that this faction is trying to bring about the Apocalypse. Armageddon. The battle between Michael and Lucifer. They think that when it's over, they'll get paradise on earth. Probably by wiping out the human race."

"That all? Just total fucking world domination?" Dean asked sarcastically. "He have any ideas about what to do about it?"

Ellie lifted her hand in a see-saw gesture. "It's hard to say. He said that Destiny is dictating that this come to pass. But he also told me that free will was the power God gave to humanity, and even to the fallen, and we can choose our own fates."

"Did he say where the hell God's been through all this? Why he isn't bringing the angels back into line?"

"He said that the angels think God's gone," she said. "He's not sure if that's true or not."

"Yeah, well, according to Cas, God was the one who ordered the angels to get my ass out of Hell," Dean said to her. She heard the uncertainty in his voice as the different implications began to sink into him.

"Yeah, it's possible that those orders came from a bit lower down the chain of command," she said, turning her head away from him and closing her eyes.

"Well, that's fucking awesome, isn't it?"

"Try and get some sleep," she suggested, easing herself over a little more to her right. "It'll be light soon."

"Yeah, and Lilith's on her way," Dean reminded her, snorting a little at the idea of sleeping.

She barely heard him when he asked a minute later, "Ellie? Bullshit, you're not asleep … are you?"

* * *

Dean tipped his head back against the wall behind him and closed his eyes. Sleep. Yeah. Right.

He let the things she'd told him drift around in his mind, and slowly, he saw the things he should've asked more about, the things she'd talked around, almost, the details she hadn't given. Dirty angels. Fallen angels. Why they'd wanted him in Hell. She'd talked about that before. His brother no longer mentioned it, but he'd seen the fear in Sam's eyes, on the long drive back to Bobby's when Sam'd realised that there was no way of stopping it. It was a fear that everything had been a trap, and that trap hadn't been for Sam, it'd been a trap for him.

Well, he'd sprung it, he thought, opening his eyes and staring at the ceiling. He'd made the deal. And it hadn't helped anything at all.

He looked down at the woman sleeping beside him.

_I was in Egypt, until the day before yesterday_, she'd said. He wondered vaguely how long she'd been travelling to get back to the States. Long enough to be able to go sleep with cracked ribs, a gunshot wound and a swollen face on the floor of a prison while waiting for the most powerful demon in Hell to show up, he thought sardonically to himself.

Leaning forward, he tested the strength of his left arm by supporting his weight on it, nodding a little as it held. He stretched out his legs and slid his hands under Ellie's waist and shoulders, lifting her head onto his thigh. The muscles surrounding the joint were sore and aching, they would be for a few days, he knew, but they were functioning. When Lilith arrived, he'd be able to go down fighting.

Ellie shifted slightly against him, rolling a little further to her left and he tucked his coat under her back without thinking about it. He'd wanted to ask her why she hadn't been in touch, he realised as he resettled himself against the wall. Why she hadn't told him – or Sam – or Bobby even, that she was alive? It would've taken one burden from him, at least, not having her death on his conscience.

Thinking uncomfortably about what she'd said she'd seen when the hellhounds had come to the house in New Harmony, he wondered if she hadn't called his brother because she'd seen something she'd been afraid of. Something _he'd_ been afraid of, when he'd watched Sam pull that demon from the meatsuit with Ruby hovering around behind him. He'd wanted to go then, he admitted to himself, had wanted to leave, unable to face watching his brother turn into (_turn into something he might have to kill_) something that didn't seem human to him. He hadn't been able to. And Sam said he would stop, stop messing around with powers that weren't human.

How much did Ellie know? How much wasn't she telling him? _I don't trust anyone with everything_, she'd told him. He hadn't been sure at the time if that'd been a tacit admission for him. Looking tiredly around the room, he acknowledged to himself dryly that it wasn't exactly the best place for a long, and what he thought would definitely be, a complicated conversation. The little matter that they probably wouldn't get out of here alive was another factor.

He had no idea of what they were gonna do when Hell's most powerful turned up, and looking down at the face of the woman resting on him, he had an idea she didn't either. He pushed aside a strand of hair that'd fallen over her cheek absently. The difference was, she wasn't chewing herself into little pieces churning over and over all the crap, he thought with a wry half-smile, tipping his head back against the wall and closing his eyes.

_Angels. Demons. Heaven. Hell. Ruby. Sam. Cas. Anna. Alastair. And the devil in his cage_.

The pieces were there, he thought disconnectedly. They were all there but he couldn't see how they fit together. Cas was being told one thing, and it seemed like the angels were doing another.

He didn't think he'd sleep. His thoughts faded away, leaving darkness behind his closed lids and he didn't notice that he was falling until he had.

* * *

Sam drove the black car up the drive and around to the back of the small house, stopping in the yard next to the compact rental. Travis had been silent for the whole journey, sitting in the back seat, his eyes sometimes meeting Sam's in the rearview mirror, huge and filled with fear. Sam turned around.

"Okay, we're here. You ready?"

Sam left one of Ruby's hex bags in the car. Better if no one sees it, no one recognises it, he thought, even here out of general view. The other he put into the pocket of his coat. He slid out of the driver's seat and slammed the door shut, opening the rear door for the boy. As Travis came out, Sam picked him up, hoping that the hex bag on him would cover them both. There was no other choice anyway.

The door to the kitchen opened as he carried the boy up the stairs, Maurice standing back to let him through, closing it and locking up behind him again.

"Where's Ellie? And your brother?" the witch asked as Rachel ran into the room, taking her son from Sam with a cry.

Sam hesitated, looking from Rachel and Travis reluctantly back to Maurice. "They didn't get out, I've got to go back."

The witch's eyes widened, and Sam's brow furrowed up as he saw the fear in them. "What?"

"I scried, in the crystal," Maurice said, glancing at Rachel nervously. "The path was dark. Something big is coming, Winchester, something … monstrous. Ellie said you were going to get the kid and go–"

"Calm down," Sam said, his hand clamping around the witch's arm and dragging him out of the room. "You're safe here, right?" he continued in a lower voice when they stood close together at the end of the hall.

"Not safe from that!" Maurice hissed at him.

_Lilith_, Sam thought with a cold certainty.

He loomed over the witch, his hand curling into a fist in Maurice's shirtfront. "You made a deal, you cut them loose and we _will_ hunt you down, and let every other fucking witch in the country know that you're alive and kicking and how to find you," he said, the promise in his voice malevolent.

Maurice shrank back against the wall. "They'll smell him out here," he protested weakly. "I can't protect them."

"You think demons are bad?" he said to the man, leaning closer. "You don't want my brother on your ass, Maurice."

"I'll – I'll do what I can!" the witch said, turning his head away.

"You better make sure that you do," Sam snapped. He let go of him, turning back to the kitchen and pulling Ruby's hex bag from his coat pocket. If the witch did run, Travis had to remain unseen.

In the kitchen, Sam looked at the little boy. Travis sat at the table, both hands curled around a cup of milk, his mother sitting beside him. Dark hair fell over his forehead, and he had a small milk moustache as he turned to look at Sam.

"Rachel," Sam said, going to the table. "I've got to go. My brother – you need to stay here, you and Travis."

He crouched beside the boy's chair, and put the hex bag into the pocket of Travis' jacket, zipping the pocket closed. "This is going to hide him, and you, alright? You keep it with you all the time, never take it off."

Rachel looked at him and nodded and again Sam wondered at her calm acceptance. He turned to look at Travis, meeting a pair of wide, green eyes, a slighter darker line of green around the irises.

"Maurice –" he said, glancing back at the hallway. "He's going to stay with you and make sure nothing finds you."

He hoped that was true, but his doubts persisted. Maurice was terrified and he had the feeling that the witch didn't have much of a character to begin with.

"We're coming back, okay?" he said, turning from Travis back to his mother. "When I've got Dean and Ellie back, we'll be coming straight here, to take you someplace safer."

Something flickered in Rachel's eyes, but she nodded again, reaching out her hand to him. "We'll be fine, Sam. You must go, and do what you have to."

Sam straightened up, going to the back door. He turned as he opened it. "Lock up, stay here."

Rachel got to her feet and walked with him to the door. "Go, the witch – the witch said there wasn't much time."

The door closed behind him and he walked fast to the car, getting in and starting the engine, twisting around in the seat to reverse out. She was right, he thought, his pulse accelerating. There wasn't much time.

* * *

Dean woke with a slight start, the back of his head hitting the wall. He rubbed a hand over his face, finding it hard to believe he'd actually fallen asleep. No dreams had come, that he could remember. Just a peaceful darkness that seemed vaguely miraculous. He looked at his watch.

Just an hour, he thought. The building was quiet and the windows were still black with the night.

Looking down as Ellie lifted a hand and touched her face gingerly, he met her eyes as she opened them.

"First time we slept together," he said, trying for a joke and rewarded as he saw her quickly hidden smile.

"You'll have to forgive me for saying I really hoped for better on such an occasion," she retorted mildly, rolling cautiously onto her elbow and easing herself into a sitting position beside him.

He snorted. "Gimme another chance, I'll make it up."

He watched her tense and test her body, the tiny movements familiar to him, he'd done the same thing himself on waking. He waved a hand around the room when she relaxed back against the wall.

"What now?"

"Well, we can't be here when Lilith turns up," she said, opening an eye and looking at him. "Those windows look like they're going to be a tight fit for you."

He looked around and up to the clerestory windows that lined the wall under the line of the ceiling. They were narrow, he thought. She'd fit through easily, he wasn't so sure if he would.

"There's a forty-foot drop to the ground from those," he said, turning back to her when she shook her head.

"Catwalk runs under them on this wall," she corrected him, pointing to the longer wall. "Forty-foot drop for those," she added, looking at the short wall at the other end of the room.

"And about a hundred demons here now."

He was arguing the devil's case, he knew. The windows were the only way out and he wasn't sure why she wasn't already under them, asking him for a boost.

"Yeah, we'll need a diversion, something to bring them all up here."

His gaze sharpened on her as he got an idea of what she had in mind.

"No."

She looked at him patiently. "You're not in bad shape, you can make it and get the cavalry." She glanced up at the windows and shook her head. "I'm not going to be able to make even a fast hobble, right now. This can work –"

"No," he repeated, a little louder, his expression stony.

"Got a better idea?" she asked.

"We sit here and wait for Sam," he said. "He'll be here."

"And if Lilith turns up before he gets back?"

"Then –" he started and stopped, scowling as he looked away from her. He wasn't leaving her behind and getting out on his own. He carried enough guilt for the people he'd let die, how'd she think he'd be able to live with that?

"What? We just die together, nobly?" she asked pointedly. "Come on, Dean, that's not a plan."

He swung around to look at her, his mouth compressed. "I – I am not going – just – no, alright? No."

For a moment, he thought she'd keep arguing, but she didn't. She rolled to the side, onto her knees and braced a hand against the wall to get to her feet. He didn't miss the way her knuckles whitened under the skin as she leaned there for a few seconds, her back stiff with tension.

"What're you doing?"

She straightened up, glancing back past her shoulder at him. "Just need to move around a bit."

"How's the dressing holding up?"

She looked down, her hand feeling under her shirt. "Not bad, probably stopped bleeding."

Dean bit back his comment as he watched her take a few steps along the wall, keeping her hand against it for support. From the way she was tilted to one side, he thought her ribs were hurting worse than the bullet wound.

"Why didn't you tell Sam or Bobby you were alive?" he asked her when she stopped at the corner.

"I thought it might be an advantage to what I needed to do, to be thought of as dead," she answered, and he had the feeling that she'd thought out that answer before, had it all ready.

As he watched her walk slowly along the wall, he leaned back, recognising that in spite of the feeling, he still trusted her. He didn't know where the trust he had in her had come from, how it'd formed or why it persisted, even when it was obvious she didn't tell him everything. What he'd told her about himself had gone no further, he knew, not even to his brother. That might've been one reason. He'd tried not to think about it, before she'd disappeared. Then he'd tried not to think about her, after. He watched her step out, away from the wall, get her balance and start across the room, her gait steadying as her muscles warmed and loosened. Someday, he'd get it straight with her, he thought.

"You could've let us know," he said, and she slowed, turning her head to look at him.

"I didn't know you'd been raised until this week, Dean," she said, her voice tight. "And I tried Sam's number, and Bobby's, and Rufus – Olivia – Annie and Marcus as soon as I found out. They were either disconnected or ringing out."

He remembered that Sam had changed numbers while he'd been gone. Bobby and Rufus were still in the Dominican, chasing down a renegade Haitian bokor. He didn't know about the others, although he hadn't heard from Annie in years.

Ellie turned away and kept walking, looking like she was forcing herself to move faster, to take a longer stride.

"If those holes start to bleed again, don't think I'm giving up another shirt to dress them," he said loudly. She didn't respond but slowed down a little, reaching the end of the room and stopping for a minute before she started back close by the wall with the windows.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

* * *

Sam made his way between the buildings, keeping to the shadows, every sense on high alert. The entire place was quiet, the snow flurries making it impossible to see far, and he was too aware of how exposed he was here, on his own, tracks left in the thin white cover on the ground, the luminescence of the snow showing him up as he crossed the narrow alleys from one warehouse to the next.

He slowed as he saw the light ahead, reflecting fitfully against the building and over the wet asphalt. It looked incongruous against the black of the night, flickering like firelight, and he slid along the darkness of the wall, dropping to a crouch at the corner, easing a sliver of his face out past the edge.

A ring of fire stood by the other building. Sam blinked as he recognised Uriel standing in the centre. _What the …?_

Staring in perplexed confusion at the angel, his peripheral vision caught a movement at the doorway to the building and he turned his head very slowly, eyes narrowing as he saw the two men walk out, and over to the circle.

Chewing on the corner of his lip indecisively, Sam watched the men stop by the edge of the circle. The angel was going to be his best chance of getting through however many demons there were in the building, he thought. Maybe his only chance of getting Dean and Ellie out alive.

_If they were still alive_, the thought snuck in and he banished it. He'd know, he thought. If something had happened, he'd know.

There was nearly a hundred yards of open ground between him and the demons and the circle. It was a bad risk. They'd see him the second he moved. He was good, and fast, but two against one wasn't the sort of odds he wanted and he knew he had no idea of how powerful the two were. He couldn't rely on the things Ruby'd taught him. Without the blood he was too weak.

He watched as the angel moved to one side of the circle, leaving a wide gap between himself and the flames. He was too far to hear what was being said, the wind's soft moan along the metal-clad buildings covering the conversation effectively, but he could see the angel gesturing impatiently, one hand stabbing at the building beside them. One of the demons threw back its head and laughed. The other just stared at the angel.

Sam looked across the roadway to the next block of warehouses. He might be outside of their peripheral vision if he crossed to those first, then came up behind them. It was still open, still risky, but less than a direct approach. He readied himself for the run, hand closing tightly around the bone handle of Ruby's knife.

* * *

"How's Sam been?" Ellie asked, and Dean looked away, wondering how to answer that.

"He's–_"_ – _good_, he'd meant to say but he couldn't make that come out, brows drawing together as he wondered why.

"He's – uh – focussed," he told her instead, wincing inwardly as he recognised he wasn't telling her the whole truth, any more than she'd told him.

She stopped next to him and looked down, her mouth twisting up slightly. "Focussed on what?" she asked him, easing herself down the wall until she was sitting. "Developing the psychic powers he thought he'd lost?"

His head snapped around as he stared at her. "How'd you know–?"

"When I got in here, he was having some kind of a – mental – struggle with the demon that was holding you against the ceiling," she told him, stretching out her legs. "It wasn't going all that well, he'd burst some blood vessels trying to do whatever it was he was trying to do, and it looked like he could hardly stand."

Closing his eyes, Dean leaned his head back against the wall. "When I – after I'd gone, Ruby showed up, saved his life, told him she could help to get strong enough to kill Lilith," he said flatly.

"Mm-hmm?"

"He's been pulling demons out of the meatsuits, sending them back to Hell or burning them up, I'm not sure what he does with them," he continued reluctantly, his eyes closing, not wanting to look at her, not wanting to see what she thought of that.

"He gets the nosebleeds whenever he does it?"

He opened an eye and turned his head to look at her. "Sometimes. He says he gets that if the strain is too much."

"If the demon's more powerful?"

"I guess, yeah," he said, thinking of Samhain and the way Sam had dealt with the demon. _After_ he'd told him that he wasn't going to use the powers. "He, uh, got a blood nose when he took down a demon called Samhain."

Ellie stared at him. "Samhain?"

"Yeah, I know, he was powerful –"

"Powerful?" She shook her head at him. "One of the most powerful in Hell, top echelon, Dean. Sam took him down?"

"I watched it," he told her, his face hardening slightly with the memory. "Why?"

"That demon tonight, nothing like Samhain, not a grunt but third, fourth tier, at most," she said, rubbing the heel of her hand over her forehead. "If he took down Samhain, he shouldn't have been struggling with it."

"Been a hard few days," Dean said, wondering distractedly how the hell she knew all this stuff about demons and their places in the halls of Hell.

"Maybe," Ellie said, the small crease in between her brows. "How many times have you seen him do it?"

"Not many," he admitted. "We – uh – I told him not to do it. He said he wasn't going to use the power any more but then he – uh – had no choice, with Samhain."

"When was that?"

"Halloween," Dean said, watching her. "Why?"

"Has he tried again? Since then?" she asked, turning awkwardly to look at him.

"Uh, once," he said, thinking of Sam's failure to touch Alastair in the church. "That I know of."

"Did he succeed?"

"No," he said, uncertain if he wanted to tell her about Alastair. "The demon was too strong."

"Stronger than Samhain? That's a big-time player to be chasing after you two?"

"He was after the fallen angel," he said, looking away as he realised she was going to piece together his half-lies and omissions with or without his help. "We were trying to protect her."

"Angels don't need protection from demons," Ellie said, looking curiously at him.

"She didn't know – she wasn't an angel at the time," he said, waving a hand in the air awkwardly. "Apparently she ripped her Grace out and, uh, grew up human. Like I said, it's a long story – and, uh, the angels said she had to be killed and the demons wanted to torture her, because she could hear the angels talking, and–"

"And you and Sam got in the way?" she asked softly.

He glanced at her, unable to see her face, her head bowed and her hair fallen forward.

"Yeah, we tried to," he said, letting out a long exhale. "She got her Grace back."

The silence stretched out, his thoughts tangled up with memory and guilt, of Anna, of Sam. He tried to shove it back down behind the walls he'd built, tried to think of something else, anything else.

"Sam said Ruby's helping him," he said, several minutes later, not really wanting to talk about the demon either but driven to it. He needed to hear someone else's opinion of Ruby, of what Sam was doing. "She, uh, seems to be on the level."

"She's a demon," Ellie said, lifting her head and turning to look at him.

"Yeah," he agreed, with a grimace. "You don't think she's trying to help him?"

"I don't know what she's doing," Ellie said carefully. "But I doubt it's for Sam's benefit."

His instincts told him the same thing, he thought uneasily. He hadn't wanted to acknowledge it. Hearing someone else say it made it worse. Sam'd told him everything, too much of everything, he remembered, his lip curling down. And Ruby had gone to bat for them, not just once. She'd put herself willingly into Alastair's hands to get the angels and demons together.

"Are you worried about Sam?" she asked.

"I'm always worried about Sam," Dean said, letting his breath out in a gust of frustration. "And Sam worries about me," he added, thinking of his brother's insistence that he talk about it, talk it out. _Get it out_. It wasn't possible to 'get it out', no matter what Sam, or Anna, said. "It's making it too easy for our enemies."

"Yeah, I can see that," she said, her breath huffing out in a tired-sounding exhale. "But there's nothing you can do about it. No matter how much that vulnerability scares you, it's a part of you, a part of your life. You can't wake up one morning and be done with it."

"No," he agreed unwillingly.

No, he couldn't be done with it. They were each other's weak spots and he thought that was always going to be the way it was. He rubbed his fingers over his temple, wincing as they grazed by a cut he hadn't known he had. Abruptly, he realised he wanted to stop talking about himself, about his fears and doubts, about Sam. "What about you?"

"Are you fishing for my vulnerabilities, Dean?" she asked him, her tone light. The corners of her mouth tucked in, showing small dimples.

"You don't have anyone in your life that makes you … easy to get to?" he asked dubiously.

"No one who's obvious, at least," she said, the half-hidden smile vanishing. "There are people I care about; I'd be in a mental ward if there weren't. But I don't see them often. And I cover my tracks when I do. They're not perfectly protected. But they're safe enough, I hope."

"Friends? Family? Other?"

"All of the above," she agreed. He turned his head, trying to see her expression, wondering who those people were, who counted her close to them, who knew her, knew all about her. Had she told them she was alive, or let them grieve, thinking her dead?

"I don't know how you do it." He closed his eyes, feeling the familiar weariness settling onto him again.

"I wasn't raised as a hunter," she said, her voice quiet. "I went into it knowingly. Knowing what it would cost. Knowing what I would lose. Knowing that, for me, at least, the sacrifice was worthwhile." She hesitated for a moment, then added, "It's different for you and Sam, Dean. You're at the centre of all this. You've always been at the centre."

"Yeah." Leaning back against the wall, he thought about his life, his and Sam's and their father's. Since the fire, they'd been on the move. He'd lost count of the towns they'd been in, the people whose lives they'd drifted in and out of, the hunts they'd done. He was tired of it, he realised. Tired of fighting. Tired of not having anything of his own.

"Don't you want to have a family, have kids?" he asked, the question coming out before he realised he'd thought of it.

"Someday. Sure," she said, and he heard a faint tension in her voice. She cleared her throat and continued, "I guess. Not a lot of options for that in this life."

"No," he agreed, thinking of Lisa's offer to him. To stay, be a part of her family with Ben. Be normal. He hadn't even thought of her when he'd gotten out. _It's not my life_, he'd told her, and it'd been true, even without the fast track to damnation, he'd had work he had to do, a job that he couldn't turn away from.

"Would you get out of this life, to have that?" he asked quietly. "I mean, if you found someone?"

"I don't know," Ellie said, and she turned to look at him. "That would depend on the person, I guess. But, maybe I'm just not ready."

* * *

Sam froze as the demons stepped back from the circle, heads snapping to either side as they looked around them. He felt the vibration a second later, first through his feet as the ground trembled, then through his teeth, through the bones of his face, a sharp oscillation that seemed to have no source but was becoming increasing more painful.

Looking back at the circle, he saw Uriel step back, into the centre of the circle and the demons turn to him, one of them waving an arm wildly at him.

They were as distracted as they were going to get, Sam thought, tensing himself to make the run across the alley. He glanced back and hesitated as behind the demons, two men appeared. Even at the distance, in the darkness and flurries, Sam recognised Castiel's trenchcoat, the beige garment swinging out as the angel strode forward and touched one of the demons. The other man, dressed in a grey business suit and long black overcoat, intercepted the second demon as it ran toward the building's door, reaching out and slamming a hand against its forehead. A brilliant white light flooded from the mouth and eye, flaring to a painfully bright corona. It faded to nothing as the bodies of the possessed men dropped to the ground.

Sam watched Castiel step close to the circle of flame, his hands held out, the palms down. The angel lowered them, and the fire surrounding Uriel began to drop, dying away to nothing. He could barely make them out as Uriel stepped across the charred line on the ground. They stood there for a moment, then disappeared, and he shook his head, leaning back against the wall. _What the hell was going on?_

Flashes of light erupted beneath the edges of the warehouse's doors and above the wind he heard screams of rage and pain, abruptly cut off, one by one. Getting to his feet, he ran for the doors, hitting the postern door hard with his shoulder, ignoring the starburst of pain in his head as he slowed and stared at the bodies that lay strewn over the floor in a trail leading to the gallery stairs.

* * *

"The bleeding's stopped," Dean said, peering under the dressing at Ellie's stomach and resettling the knotted sleeves. "If we're going, we should do –"

The sounds of screams, of deep voices ringing out, cut him off. They looked at each other, and Dean got to his feet, extending his hand and pulling Ellie up as she took it. They moved to the back wall, both watching the door.

The door flew open, crashing into the wall behind it and Uriel strode through the opening, a scowl on his face, his dark eyes fixed on Ellie. Stepping forward and in front of her, he blocked the angel's path effectively, one brow lifting as the angel came to an abrupt halt in front of him.

"Get out of the way," Uriel snapped, his gaze shifting to Dean, the scowl deepening. "This is none of your business."

"You keep saying that," Dean pointed out conversationally, keeping his face expressionless as he stared at the seraph. "An' I keep disagreeing. Maybe we should figure out a way to stop wasting each other's time?"

Dean watched as Uriel's mouth thinned out, his hands curling into fists. Either he was important to the god squad, or he thought recklessly, he wasn't. If he wasn't, he was about to find out what being smote by an angel of the lord felt like.

"Uriel?" Castiel appeared behind the dark angel. "You found them?"

"Good to see you, Cas," Dean said, his gaze remaining on Uriel's face. "Your subordinate here seems to be having some control issues."

Castiel walked past Uriel, looking from Dean to Ellie. "Where's Sam?"

"He got out, saved the boy," Dean told him, seeing a flicker of some emotion in Uriel's eyes. "The Seal is safe."

Castiel looked slowly from Dean's face to Uriel's. "That's good news. Where is he?"

Dean took a step back, stopping next to Ellie. The smile he gave the angels was cold. "He's somewhere where he can't be found by demons … or anyone else."

Uriel made an indeterminate noise in his throat and turned away. Castiel frowned at the other angel, turning back to Dean. "What are you implying, Dean?"

"Nothing," Dean said blandly, his gaze flicking to Cas for a moment, then returning to Uriel.

"Uriel, you can report back to the garrison that the Seal has been saved. Amoch and I will clean up," Castiel instructed.

The dark angel's head slowly turned to him. "Are you sure that's wise?"

Looking at Cas, Dean saw the angel's face twitch at the question, the dark blue eyes narrowing very slightly as Cas stared back at his subordinate. Uriel returned the stare for a second longer, and Dean thought that disturbed Cas more than the question had. Then the dark brown eyes dropped, Uriel inclining his head in unwilling acknowledgement.

"As you wish," Uriel said, looking past Castiel and Dean to Ellie, his expression becoming thoughtful.

"This isn't over," he said to her. Ellie stared back at him, her face expressionless.

The beating of wings stirred the hem of Castiel's coat as the angel disappeared.

"What's going on?" Cas looked at Dean, his voice grating.

"Your buddy seems to be working both sides of the fence, Cas," Dean told him, relaxing slightly. "He tried to kill Ellie, when we got here. And again just now. If you hadn't shown up, he probably would have."

Castiel turned to look at the woman standing behind Dean. "You created the holy oil trap?"

She nodded.

"Where did you learn of that?" he asked, walking past Dean.

"A Watcher told me," she said, noting his genuine confusion as she looked into his eyes.

"And you got fed some bad information, Cas," Dean said. "Killing that kid would've broken the seal, same as letting the demons have him."

Castiel turned back to him. "What?"

"Maybe you need to check out those orders," Dean suggested, registering the confusion in Cas' face. "You might be getting set up."

"I will speak to Uriel," the angel said, turning away. "That cannot be correct."

Dean looked at Ellie. She was watching Cas with the same wary look as she had Uriel. He didn't want to think that this angel had been playing him, no matter what the others were doing. "I don't think you'll get the truth from Uriel."

"Dean?" Sam's voice came from the hallway.

"Sam? In here." Dean walked slowly past Cas to the door as Sam walked in.

"Sorry I couldn't get here earlier." He glanced around the room, looking from Ellie to Castiel. "It was hard to know who was on the right side."

"Yeah, that's becoming a real issue," Dean said, glancing back at the angel. He turned back to his brother, noticing that Sam's face was paler than usual, a little pinched looking. "You alright? You get the kid back to his mom okay?"

Sam nodded. "They're safe – I think – for the moment," he said, glancing back at Ellie. "That witch wasn't going to stick around. I left them with Ruby's hex bag."

"He's not exactly known for his valour in the face of the enemy," she said.

"Let's go," Dean said, looking around the room. His shoulder needed ice, Ellie needed a better dressing, and her ribs taped, the job was done. He walked to the door and stopped as she turned to look up at Castiel.

"Dean's right, you know. Your orders aren't coming from God, or anyone representing God."

He stared at her for a long moment, then disappeared, the flutter of wings echoing softly in the confines of the small room.

"He does that," Dean said, not sure why he was explaining the angel's eccentricities. "Not much in the way of social skills."

Walking slowly to him, Ellie asked, "He's the one you trust?"

Dean nodded uncomfortably. Did he have a reason, he wondered? Cas had pulled him out of Hell. They were all supposed to be trying to stop the devil from getting free. That had seemed enough for him.

"Weren't you the one who told me he didn't believe in angels, Dean?" she asked him, her voice light.

"Yeah, well, when they're in your face, they're hard to discount," he said tiredly, following her out the door.

* * *

Dean looked around the empty room. Sam leaned against the wall, his shoulders slumped.

"Where is she? Did they get them again?" he asked.

Ellie shook her head. "No, I left her some instructions, a place to take Travis if anything happened to us. She had the protective symbols from Maurice, and your hex bag. "

"Why?" Dean looked at her. Was this what she hadn't been telling him, he wondered? An alternative arrangement if the plan went south? He had the feeling it was one of the things, but not all of it.

"Demons are watching your every move." Ellie looked from Dean to Sam. "And now, I've got an angel with a heavy grudge looking for me. She and Travis will be safer on their own. Penemue gave me a place to take them. A place that really is protected from both angels and demons."

"And you didn't tell us about this arrangement because …?" Sam looked at her questioningly.

She lifted a shoulder in a tired shrug. "If you don't know about it, then you can't talk about it, not even under torture."

Dean exchanged a glance with this brother, his mouth twitching in a half-smile at Sam's shocked expression. It made sense to him, he thought. But then he'd been trained in need-to-know by the best. The thought of his father wiped the faint amusement away completely.

"We need to get you patched up properly," he said to Ellie.

"Not here," she told him, looking around. Maurice had been gone as well when they'd arrived. They hadn't found any sign of demon presence, but it didn't mean they didn't know about the place, or wouldn't be able to sniff out Travis' brief stay here.

"Somewhere out of the city," she continued, turning for the door. "A long way from the city."

"Yeah, I hear that," Dean agreed, glancing at Sam. "Got anything in mind?"

"Anywhere I can pick up a rental to get me home," she said, leaning against the doorway as she looked back at him.

"Home's Richmond, right?" he asked, following her down the stairs to the car. She looked like she was ready to drop, he thought, watching her get into the back seat of the Impala.

"Right."

"We'll take you," he said as he slid into the driver's seat.

* * *

_**Jackson, Ohio**_

The farm had been an orchard, sometime in the past, Dean though as the car bumped over the track leading from the county road. Rows of gnarled and twisted trees blocked their view to either side. He slowed as he came out into a cleared area, several fields surrounding a large pond, the two-storey white frame house flanked by a barn to one side and a number of lower, longer sheds to the other.

"Ellie, this it?" he asked, his gaze flicking to the rear-view mirror. Sam turned around in the front seat and shook his head.

"She's out."

"Looks like it, right?"

"It's the right address," Sam agreed, yawning. Another hour and it'd be dawn and he wanted to sleep, for as long as possible.

Ellie had suggested this place as they headed south and east, instead of stopping at a motel. Dean wasn't sure it was such a great idea, but they were here now.

He pulled up in the dooryard and turned off the car, getting out and going to the rear door as he tossed the keys to his brother. Ellie was lying along the back seat, and he leaned over her, fingers closing around her shoulder, the light touch bringing her to wakefulness immediately.

"We're here," he said, and she nodded, sitting up and clambering out of the car after him. He didn't miss the way her face screwed up as she tried to move too fast.

Sam had the trunk open and they moved to the back, taking gear bags and duffels out. Following Ellie up the porch steps, Dean looked around again. The place seemed deserted, but it wasn't derelict.

"Whose place is this?" he asked as she stopped at the front door.

Loosening a section of the door jamb, Ellie extracted a key, and opened the door.

"It belonged to Marcus' grandmother," she said, walking into the hall. "Marcus didn't want to run the farm and he and his brother turned into a kind of safe house a few years ago before Tony was killed. They modified it."

"Modified it how? Exactly?" Dean asked, looking around the normal looking rooms doubtfully and dumping his bags on the floor by the stairs. It looked like any farm house he'd ever seen, old-fashioned furniture lightly coated in dust and dust sheets, the air a little musty.

"The walls are packed with iron filings, salt lines and hex bags," Ellie said, closing the door with a yawn and following him into the living room. "It's protected," she added unnecessarily, walking through the double room to the kitchen.

"How many hunters are out there we don't know about?" Sam muttered to Dean as he walked past him, following Ellie to the kitchen.

It was a good question, Dean thought.

* * *

The kitchen was well-stocked with canned and dried food and a large, comprehensively filled medical kit. As Sam cleared the dishes from the table, Dean looked at the redhaired woman drooping at the end of the table.

"You ready?"

She looked up at him and nodded, getting to her feet.

Dean lifted the kit and followed her up the stairs to the bathroom, setting the box on the sink counter and running hot water into a bowl as Ellie pulled off her blood-stiffened jacket and shirt. He dumped a load of salt into the steaming water and dropped to one knee to unknot his makeshift bandage.

The bleeding had stopped, the wads of his tee shirt soaked but mostly dry and sticking to her skin. Slopping the hot water over the cloth, he peeled it off from both sides and took a gauze pad to clean off the rest of the dried blood. The skin was white around the darker edges of the holes, and he glanced at her.

"Doesn't look like there's any infection," he said.

"Good, I could use a break," she said absently, looking down awkwardly at the holes to either side of her belly button.

He sluiced them out thoroughly with the saline, handing her a clean, dry dressing to dry it off as he found a tube of antiseptic powder and puffed it in. Pulling out a couple of thick gauze pads from the box, he ripped the packs open and taped them down, ignoring the faint frisson through his nerves as his fingertips touched her skin. It occurred to him briefly that the touch wasn't accompanied by a hell-memory flash.

As he straightened up and took out a roll of elasticised bandage, something she'd said earlier came back to him … _I didn't know you'd been raised until this week_ …

"How'd you find out I was back?" he asked, holding one end of the bandage just above the dressings and reaching around behind her with the roll.

He heard her soft exhale. "Penemue told me he heard the angels talking about you, the orders to get you out," she said.

"That all?" he asked, abruptly wishing he hadn't, keeping his gaze fixed on the bandage he was wrapping around her.

"No," Ellie said, and he felt his stomach drop a little at the flatness in her voice, remembering what Anna had said. She'd heard the angels talking about it too. About what had happened to him. About what he'd done.

"He told you everything, didn't he?" he asked. His fingers slipped on the elastic clip for fastening the bandage, and he closed his eyes, forcing them to grip the end and catch in the material.

"Yeah," she said quietly as he turned away, shoving everything back into the kit.

"So you know – or think you know – what I did? What I went through?"

He heard the accusation in the statement, under that a defensiveness, his voice roughened and deep. He hadn't wanted her to know that. Didn't want her to know about it. Didn't want anyone to know it.

Standing by the sink with his back to her, he asked, "Is that what you meant about not trusting anyone, Ellie? You think you can't trust me now?"

She was silent for a moment, and he waited, not really wanting to hear the answer to that, but needing to know, the conflict tearing at him.

"No, that's not what I meant," she said finally, her voice low. "And no, I don't know what happened to you, only what I've been told. Not what it felt like to you."

His throat closed as he heard the compassion in her voice, like Anna's, like Cas'. Like his brother's. He looked down at the sink, staring sightlessly at the drain. Shame trickled like liquid fire through him, burning him as it spread.

"There are no innocent souls in Hell, Dean," she continued, gently insistent. "The damned are there for a reason."

He kept his eyes fixed on the sink. Sam had said the same thing. He didn't know how that was supposed to make how he'd felt better. "Not even mine?"

"Not even yours," she told him. "You chose to be there, to swap your life for Sam's, without thinking that you were actually swapping your soul for Sam's life."

"Yeah." If it had been his life, it would have been fine, he thought, dragging in a deep breath to loosen the tight muscles in his chest. Dead is one thing. Damned for eternity another altogether.

He lifted his gaze slowly, seeing her watching him through the mirror above the sink, catching an expression in her eyes he couldn't make out.

"What?"

"What you did –"

"Don't. Stop, okay?" he cut her off, his hands curling into fists on the counter top as he looked back down. "Sam, Anna, now you – I don't want – I can't talk about it, I can't."

"Alright," she said quickly. "Okay. I just–"

"You wanna help, yeah, I know," he interrupted, rubbing a hand over his face. "Everyone wants to help, but you can't. I can't."

He glanced up to the mirror again. Ellie stood, looking out the bathroom window, half-turned from him. Of all the people he might've been able to talk to about what he'd done, she was the last on his list. He didn't want to see pity in her eyes when she looked at him, or condemnation, or disgust.

Looking back at the kit beside him, he reached for the tape, pulling it out and turning back to her.

"Your ribs need taping," he said, clearing his throat.

She shook her head. "No, leave them," she told him. "They're not moving much and I'm not planning on doing anything athletic for a while."

"You want something for the pain?"

"No," she told him, a thin edge to her voice. "It's not bad."

He nodded, putting the tape back and closing the box. Behind him, Ellie pulled on a clean shirt, pushing her stained, stiff jeans off and putting clean ones on, her back to him.

Picking up the box, Dean left the bathroom, going down the stairs and back to the kitchen.

"Ellie alright?" Sam asked, and he nodded, putting the box back in the cupboard and going to the fridge.

"How long do you want to stay?" Sam asked, looking out through the window over the fields and orchard.

"Long enough to get some sleep," Dean said. "We can go tonight, after dark."

* * *

He woke an hour before sunset, disoriented in the plain bedroom, unsure of where he was. Lifting his arm and looking at his watch, he realised he'd gotten about six hours, the last couple filled with dreams, turgid and disturbing, but as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up, he had to admit that he felt more caught up than he had for a while. He realised he didn't have a bottle nearby, and he didn't want a drink.

Downstairs, the curtains were drawn against the gold of the late afternoon sun, and the rooms were gloomy. He started at the shadow that detached itself from one wall of the kitchen, relaxing as it resolved into Ellie.

"Coffee's fresh," she said, taking her cup to the table and sitting down.

"Right."

He walked across the kitchen and poured himself a cup, leaning a hip against the counter and looking through the window. The red and gold light gilded everything in view, covering the neglected air of the place.

"Sam up?" he asked.

"I don't think so," Ellie said. "I haven't seen him."

He drank the coffee absently, feeling a tension that hadn't been there before, between himself and the woman at the table, not sure of how to dispel it or even he wanted to right now. It seemed safer to keep it in place, for some reason.

"How do you know so much about Hell?" he asked, turning around and walking to the table. "I mean, the demons, which ones are the most powerful – all of it?"

"I–," she hesitated, looking at the contents of her cup. "Michael knew about it, he told me."

As he pulled out a chair and sat down, Dean again had the feeling that she'd told him the truth, but nowhere near all of it. He looked down at the cup in his hands.

"You think the angels are playing us? Me and Sam."

"Yeah," she said. "You know what I think."

He shook his head. "I don't know half of what you're not telling me, Ellie."

Looking away, she said, "I get the impression you don't want to know."

"Why'd you get involved in this?" he asked. He'd wanted to know that for a long time. He couldn't find a reason. Couldn't imagine a reason for anyone to get voluntarily mixed up in the mess he and Sam were living in.

She made an exasperated sound in her throat, picking up her cup. "You saved my life," she said, lifting the cup and finishing the coffee. "I wanted to clear that debt."

Dean watched her get to her feet, carry the empty cup to the sink and rinse it out. She hadn't met his eyes, and the tantalising sense that he'd missed something, or that she hadn't told him everything was strong, scratched uncomfortably in him.

Turning around slowly, she looked across the room at him, her expression shadowed with the light behind her.

"Did you leave a part of yourself down there, Dean? Or did you bring some of Hell back with you?"

The question floored him, wiping his thoughts and speculations completely from his mind. In the months that he'd been back, he'd felt both.

That time had done something to him, had changed him in some fundamental way that he still couldn't understand. But he couldn't look at those memories, couldn't relive that pain, couldn't face his guilt and his shame. They came out, by themselves, more and more often now. He didn't know how to deal with them. And that crawling sensation he felt, sometimes, that frightened him more than he could describe, even to himself.

He shook his head, eyes closing as he bowed his head. "I don't know."

"Sooner or later, you better find that out," she said, and he heard her walk past, go out the door and down the hall, her light footsteps fading away.

In the silence, what he'd felt about it all clamoured at him with a clarity that was rarely present in his life and he let it in, let it roll over him.

He might have been able to live with the memories of being tortured, he thought. The excruciating agonies and the degradation and humiliation and the way it had torn him apart day after day, year after year, until he'd barely been able to remember the person he'd been … before.

He couldn't live with the memories of torturing others. The darkness was suffocating, a black rage that was still there, caged, but looking for a way to get free. He'd felt the changes strongly, daily, when he'd picked up Alastair's razor and turned to the stone table, felt the howling, empty wastelands inside of him and the way that sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, their pain had aroused him, had satiated him.

His stomach lurched and he tried to push the memories away, push them deep, hating the way they kept cracking him open, breaking him every time he caught a glimpse of what he'd done. He rubbed his hand hard over his face, impatient with the moisture he felt against his fingers, impatient with himself, with the weakness he felt inside.

_God commanded it. Because we have work for you_. The angel's words rolled through his mind and he sat hunched over the table, eyes closing. God had made a mistake, he thought. He was broken.

* * *

Castiel stood in the nave, staring up at the glorious colours of the stained glass windows. He turned as Uriel arrived.

"What is going on, Uriel? Why were you going to kill that woman?"

"She was consorting with the Fallen, Castiel, listening to their lies, spreading them."

"Penemue is a Watcher." He stared at the dark seraph. "That's not it."

Uriel sighed and looked away. "She's some kind of wildcard, Castiel. Her actions are not recorded in the paths of Destiny. We can't see what she might do, who she might influence. At this time, more than ever, such a force could prove our undoing."

Castiel looked back to the windows. He knew what Ellie was. He'd looked through the sketchy records of her life when he'd returned to Heaven. She was, indeed, a wildcard, not bound to any line of Destiny, her life free from the influences of Fate. She was supposed to have died with her parents. That the Winchesters had arrived in time, and had saved her had upset a lot of the subsequent paths.

"You will not touch this woman, Uriel." He turned back, his eyes cold.

Uriel watched him then shrugged. "If that's what you want. I think it's a mistake."

Castiel sighed. "You think that keeping the Winchesters alive is also a mistake."

Uriel's eyes narrowed. "Yes. They may have a purpose. If the demon succeeds in freeing Lucifer from the cage. But otherwise, they're disposable. Even you have to see that."

"I don't." Castiel turned away and walked through the sanctuary to the aisle. "And they are under my protection."

In the superb acoustics of the old church, the sound of wings was amplified. Castiel didn't turn back.


	7. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

* * *

_**April 10, 2009. Norfolk, Nebraska.**_

Dean leaned back against the Impala, arms crossed over his chest as he tried to keep his body heat against a chill, damp wind that blew maliciously through the open parking lot. He could've waited in the car, he thought, hunching deeper into his coat, but he couldn't sit still.

_The path you're on is truly in your blood. You're a hunter. Not because your dad made you, not because God called you back from Hell, but because it is _what you are_. And you love it. You'll find your way to it in the dark every single time and you're miserable without it. Dean, let's be real here. You're good at this. You'll be successful. You will stop it._

He shivered at the memory of the angel's words. Pulled from the hospital, healed to leave no trace of the beating he'd gotten at Alastair's hands, his memories filed under Unfound and for what? Some fucking dick with wings getting his jollies trying to make him understand that he had a job to do, as if he'd ever managed to forget that goddamned fact for even five minutes in his life.

His fists curled tighter under his arms and he looked around at the sound of the engine, watching a white pickup turn into the driveway and roll slowly across the asphalt lot toward him.

"Well, I'm here." Ellie got out, the wind whipping her hair around her face, its fiery colour vibrant against the drab day. "You want to go inside–?"

"No," he said shortly, straightening against the car as he looked at her. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"Goddamn it, Ellie, you know what!" he said, his voice rising. "Why didn't you tell me I broke the first Seal?!"

"I tried to," she said, leaning back against the door of her pickup. "You wouldn't listen, you didn't want to talk about it."

He turned away, brows drawn together. "You didn't think that was something I needed to know? Something that I would've heard better from you than from a demon?"

"Yeah, Dean, I did think it was something you needed to know," Ellie said, her voice sharp. "I just couldn't think of a way to get you to listen without–"

She stopped abruptly and looked around the cold lot. "Where's Sam?"

"At Bobby's," he said, ducking his head as he leaned against the car.

"What happened?" she asked.

He shook his head, mouth compressing tightly. "Nothing, forget it," he said, turning to the door and pulling it open.

"Don't do this, Dean," Ellie said, striding across the space between the truck and car and grabbing the door as he got in.

"Let go," he said, staring through the windshield.

"No," she told him, curling her fingers around the edge. "You want to slam it, you'll take my hand with it."

He shrugged and slid across the seat the driver's side, keeping his gaze fixed ahead as she got in after him and pulled the door closed.

"What happened?"

She wasn't going to give up, he thought, as angry with himself as he was with her. She'd been in Minnesota when he'd left the message on her phone to meet him here.

"Cas told me they needed help."

"With what?"

"Someone was killing angels," he said, looking at the wheel in frustration as he realised he was going to have to tell her more than he wanted to. A lot more. "They thought it was demons."

"And? What did they want you to do?" she asked.

He turned and looked at her then, his expression drawn. "What they thought I was good at."

"Oh, god, Dean–"

"Turned out that I wasn't, not good enough," he cut her off, looking back through the windshield, the immediate understanding in her voice slicing through him.

"It was Alastair, he was – he, uh, was the one that …" he trailed off, finding that he couldn't say it, not out loud. Not to her.

"The demon who trained you in Hell," Ellie finished, her voice expressionless.

His pulse had accelerated, compressing his chest as he nodded. "You knew about that?"

"Yeah, I knew about it," she said. "The angels wanted you to torture him? For information?"

"Yeah." He sat there, looking down at his hands, wondering why he'd thought he was going to be able those things a secret from her.

A part of him had wanted it, he knew. Had wanted to tear the demon into pieces (_carve him into a new animal)_. Had wanted it so badly he'd been shaking when he'd picked up the flask of holy and the knife. The part that scared him. But Alastair had taken everything he could do and laughed at it, and with a few words, the demon had cut him into him so deeply he'd been unable to do anything, shattered him so far beyond repair that if Zachariah hadn't done his thing, he'd still be in the hospital, he thought, lying there, wanting to die and unable to.

"I told you the angels were behind most of this," she said, her voice thicker, deeper. He shrugged.

"Why didn't you make me listen?" Anything would've been better than having Alastair drive that knife in. "You knew all of it, didn't you? That the prophecy was about me, that without me they couldn't even break the first seal?"

Ellie was silent, and he finally turned to look at her, seeing her turn her head away.

"You didn't want to believe it," she said, her back to him. "Sam knew it. He didn't want to believe it either. Didn't want to know that he'd been the bait for you."

"I'm not a righteous man," he said, his voice so low it was hardly audible.

"You were – you _are_," she said, ducking her head. "You aren't law-abiding, but you always knew what was right. And that's what it's about, you know?"

She was right about that, he thought, unable to figure out how she knew that about him when he hadn't been able to see it for himself. He knew what was right. Where the line was. Dragging in a deep breath, he tipped his head back onto the seat.

"I broke."

The admission came out hard, scraping over him. He'd learned that everything he'd feared, growing up, trying so hard to ignore, had been true. He was weak.

"No, you didn't," she said, turning halfway back, staring through the windshield. "If you had, you'd still be down there."

Shaking his head, he looked at her profile. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"You were the only they could use, Dean," she said softly. "They tried – Azazel tried – to use your father, but they couldn't. And they couldn't use Sam. And the angels left you in Hell long enough to get what they wanted."

_Pulled out all the stops, but John, he was, well, made of something unique. The stuff of heroes. And then came Dean. Dean Winchester. I thought I was up against it again. But daddy's little girl, he broke. He broke in thirty. Oh, just not the man your daddy wanted you to be, huh, Dean?_

Closing his eyes, he twisted away from the memory. Alastair had used the comparison deliberately, he'd known that. Used his own doubt against him. The demon had known where to press, where it hurt the most. He leaned against the car door, his throat tight and full. If he'd known … if he'd thought he was the one, would he have gotten off? He didn't know. He didn't know and that too was breaking him, over and over.

"Dean, I wanted to tell you, in Ohio," Ellie said hesitantly.

He could feel her eyes on him, feel her uncertainty and pity and the feeling made him cringe, inside. Rubbing his hand over his face, he forced memory and emotion back, drove it down.

"You didn't try hard enough," he said, his voice bitter.

"No, I didn't," she admitted readily. "I thought I'd have another chance."

"Yeah, well, Alastair beat you to it."

"I'm sorry."

He turned his head toward her, then looked away. He was sorry too. He didn't think he could've done it any other way, didn't think he could've stood to tell her the truth in Ohio and it didn't matter now.

"They keep telling me I'm the one who's gonna stop this," he said, scowling as he heard his voice rise a little higher.

"That's the prophecy," she agreed cautiously.

"It's impossible," he said. "I'm not – I'm not the right man for this, I'm not strong enough for this. I'm – fuck, I can't find all the pieces that used to be here."

He shifted uncomfortably on the seat, not wanting to talk about it anymore, but having to anyway. "Sam's trying to find Lilith, he says he's gonna be strong enough to kill her – how?"

Ellie didn't respond and he risked a sideways look at her, seeing her profile as she looked straight ahead at the spatter of raindrops hitting the lot.

"Can you stop him?" she asked, her expression distant.

"I don't know, I – I don't know how, I don't even know if I should," he said, staring at her. "Why?"

"Something Uriel said – when he –" She shook her head. "I can't remember exactly, but it was something about killing Lilith, something about no one killing her until …"

"Until what?"

"I don't know," she said, her voice edged in frustration. "Can Sam do it?"

"Maybe," he said, not sure of that himself. Cas had told him that his brother had vaporised Alastair, slammed the demon against the wall and burned him from the inside out. "He killed Alastair."

She caught her lower lip between her teeth. "With his abilities? His mind?"

He nodded. "He was strong again, after we dropped you back at Richmond, he just got stronger."

"Doing what?"

He shrugged. "I didn't see him doing anything."

"No one is killing Lilith until the time is right," Ellie said suddenly, her eyes opening wide.

"What?"

"That's what Uriel said, in the – the wherever he took me," she said. "_No one is killing Lilith until the time is right_."

"Right for who?"

"Right for them," she said, certainty filling her voice. "And Sam might be the only one now who could do it."

"Because Ruby helped him," Dean said, his voice flat as his brows drew together tightly. The phone calls. The secret visits. "Because Ruby showed him how."

"What did Sam say about how he was getting stronger?"

Dean shook his head. "I – I didn't ask."

He _couldn't_ ask, he knew. Sam hadn't seen Ruby for weeks, not that he'd known of, at least, he thought, and he'd been out of action for weeks. He didn't want to ask his little brother and find out that Sam was doing something that would put him squarely into the monster camp. _If I didn't know you, I would want to hunt you_. The memory of saying that to his little brother came back strongly and he swallowed hard against it. The siren in Iowa had only proved that Sam wasn't telling him the whole story.

"There are only two or three seals left," Ellie said.

"I know." He chewed on the corner of his lip as he stared through the windshield, watching the rain running down over the glass without seeing it. "Why us? Why'd it have to be us?"

Beside him, Ellie sighed. "Penemue said that it was the bloodlines. Winchester and Campbell, descended from two of the angels that fell before Lucifer started his war with Heaven."

"What's that even mean? That we're angels?" He turned to her, scowling.

"No. Not really," she said, shaking her head. "Just compatible, somehow, with them."

He looked away, his expression hardening. "So, it'll never be over."

She didn't respond and he felt his anger at her dissolving in the silence. She was right, he thought uneasily. He hadn't wanted to know about the seal, hadn't wanted to talk about what he'd done, how he'd broken – hadn't wanted to see the disappointment in her eyes. His jaw tightened a little as he realised he hadn't wanted her to see how far he'd fallen from what he'd thought he was, what he'd wanted to be.

He looked back as Ellie straightened up in the seat and reached for the door.

"Where are you going?" he asked, the feeling that they hadn't finished here twisting through his gut.

"There's a job," she said, her hand on the door catch. "I was on my way when I got your message. I need to go."

"What the hell I'm supposed to do about all this?"

She turned then, looking over her shoulder at him. "Follow your instincts," she said, her voice cool. "You'll figure it out, you don't need anyone."

It was a slap, and he stared at her, his jaw clenching to keep his denial behind his teeth. He needed help, for fuck's sake, as much as he could get, but he couldn't admit to it now, he couldn't let that need – that _weakness_ – out now, not to her.

He watched her open the door, felt the clean, rainswept air blow into the car along with a fine mist of moisture and he said nothing.

Ellie slid halfway out and paused, her head ducked against the rain. "You could've trusted me," she said, very softly.

She didn't wait for a response, the door slamming shut behind her and through the water-smeared window he saw her stride back to her pickup, getting in, heard the engine start, the truck reverse back.

Trust was a commodity that he had little of, these days. He'd always trusted her, without knowing, precisely, why. He still did, he realised very slowly, as he watched her taillights turn out of the lot and disappear up the road. He wondered why he'd been so quick to believe she'd held the information back deliberately, in that case.

* * *

_**Sioux Falls, South Dakota**_

Dean parked the Impala in front of the workshop and got out, walking to the house and climbing the stairs to the back porch.

"Where'd you go?" Sam asked, looking up from the laptop on the kitchen table.

"Uh, just, uh …" Dean hedged, swerving to the fridge to pull out a beer. He closed the fridge door, knocking the top off on the counter and turning back to his brother. "Nebraska."

Sam's brow furrowed up. "Nebraska."

"I met Ellie there," Dean said, not sure if it was a good idea to talk about it or not. He hadn't been able to get the misgivings he'd felt on hearing her thoughts on his brother out of his head the entire drive back.

"Oh," Sam said, looking back at the screen. "She okay?"

"Yeah," Dean said, going to the empty chair at the table and pulling it out. "She was on her way, uh, somewhere," he said as he sat down. "I, uh, wanted to ask her about, uh –"

"Why she didn't tell you about the seal?" Sam guessed, closing the screen as he looked over the table at his brother.

"Yeah."

"You wouldn't listen to me either," Sam reminded him.

Dean tipped the bottle up, swallowing a mouthful. Sam was a helluva lot better at lying to him than he ever would be lying to Sam.

"Yeah, well, that's more or less what she said," he admitted, looking down at the closed computer. "You find anything?"

"Maybe," Sam said. "Might be a haunting or poltergeist, in Cleveland."

"Cleveland? Seriously?" Dean asked, nose wrinkling up. "Okay, whatever. What's the story?"

"Not much, building's got retail on the ground floor, apartments above," Sam told him, getting to his feet and going to the fridge for a beer. "Two tenants died in the last six months, two others driven out, one still in a mental hospital."

"Sounds real enough."

"Yeah," Sam agreed. "The ground floor store's a book/comic store," he said. "We could start there."

Nodding, Dean finished the beer and tossed it in the trash can behind the back door, getting to his feet. "Leave in the morning?"

"I was thinking tonight," Sam said, gesturing to the row of phones against the wall. "Bobby called a while ago. He's on his way back. We'd be there by morning, get the suits on, first thing."

"Alright."

* * *

_**I-80 E, Illinois**_

Glancing at the passenger seat, Dean saw Sam was asleep, his tall frame awkwardly crunched into the corner between the seat back and the door.

The interstate ribboned ahead of him, lit up by the headlights, his world reduced to the straight run between the white lines to either side of the car.

Cas had told him that Uriel had been working against them, no surprise there, he'd thought at the time. He'd told him how his brother had broken into the torture room, flicking Alastair off the angel and against the wall, barely breaking a sweat. And whatever it was he'd done – whatever it was he could do, Dean amended silently to himself – Alastair had talked, had told them it wasn't the demons or Lilith that had been killing the angels.

Only an angel could kill an angel. Anna had killed Uriel. Cas didn't say where she'd gone, but it occurred to him that she would've known about the seal as well, could've told him that he'd broken it. Cas had known. He shook his head slightly. He hadn't been mad that the angels hadn't prepared him. Why was that?

Cas was the one who'd seen it – seen _him_ – down there. Knew every detail of what he'd done, had looked at his soul and seen it written there, all of it. Yet the angel hadn't told him.

_You don't need anyone._

He flinched back at little at the memory, his fingers tightening around the wheel as another memory crowded in.

_Anna, I don't w-want to, uh ... I don't want to ... I can't talk about that._

_I know. But when you can, you have people that want to help. You are not alone. That's all I'm trying to say._

The angel, who hadn't even been an angel then, hadn't pressed him, hadn't tried to tell him that it was a whole lot worse than what he'd thought it was. And Ellie had backed off as quickly, he thought, turning the two conversations over in his mind.

Had they all considered him so fucking fragile that he couldn't take the truth, he wondered bitterly? Or had he let everyone see how many pieces he was in and that he couldn't find a way to make himself whole again?

_I guess I'm not the man either of our dads wanted me to be_, he'd said to Cas, and it was true, wasn't it? Under the siren's spell, Sam had been brutally blunt. It _was_ a poison, the siren's venom, but he hadn't said anything to his brother that hadn't been the truth, and he knew that what the poison had pulled out of Sam had been the same.

_You know why I didn't tell you about Ruby, and how we're hunting down Lilith? Because you're too weak to go after her, Dean. You're holding me back. I'm a better hunter than you are. Stronger, smarter. I can take out demons you're too scared to go near.__You're too busy sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. Whining about all the souls you tortured in hell. Boo hoo._

It'd been the poison that brought them to that point, the poison that made it seem inevitable, necessary to kill each other … but the poison hadn't put those thoughts in their heads. Those had been there already.

He needed someone, he thought, someone to trust. And he knew that he'd probably blown that out of the water with the one person he did trust, and who'd tried to help, and with whom, someday, he might've been able to tell something of what he'd done and how it had felt.

**END**

* * *

_**AN:**_ _Chronologically, the next meeting of Dean, Sam and Ellie takes place just after episode _4.18 The Monster at the End of this Book_, in April 2009. The case they are working is detailed in _Roses in December_, which is yet to be revised._

_The next story in the Ramble On series is __**If You Needed Somebody**__, which is set between _Good God Y'All_ and _Free To Be You and Me_ in S5, prior to Dean's solo vampire hunt. This makes it early August 2009._


End file.
